The scientific community is buzzing over the discovery of an excavator operator who, while working at energy company Suncor’s Millennium Mine in Alberta, Canada, dug up one of the most complete dinosaur fossils ever found.
According to a fascinating report from National Geographic, the fossil was found by Shawn Funk on March 21, 2011. After six years of work, paleontologists have finally to unveiled the prepared fossil. The magazine reports that while Funk had dug up his fair share of fossilized plants and trees, when his bucket clipped the fossilized remains of a nodosaur, he knew very quickly that he had found something special. Here’s how National Geographic describes the scene:
“Oddly colored lumps tumbled out of the till, sliding down onto the bank below. Within minutes Funk and his supervisor, Mike Gratton, began puzzling over the walnut brown rocks. Were they strips of fossilized wood, or were they ribs? And then they turned over one of the lumps and revealed a bizarre pattern: row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.
“Right away, Mike was like, ‘We gotta get this checked out,’ ” Funk said in a 2011 interview. “It was definitely nothing we had ever seen before.”
Dinosaur fossils typically require lots of work in their reassembly to make them resemble what they looked like when roaming the earth. Many are missing several key pieces of their skeletal structure and scientists are often forced to fill in the blanks in order to identify what they’re looking at.
But that wasn’t the case with this nodosaur, an 18-foot-long, 1.5 ton herbivore that lived between 110 million and 112 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Here’s another excerpt from the National Geographic report:
