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110M year-old nodosaur is the best-preserved fossil of its kind (2017)

244 points| djsumdog | 5 years ago |nationalgeographic.com | reply

77 comments

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[+] dmix|5 years ago|reply
Previously, with better pictures: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913 (2017; 117 comments)
[+] cknoxrun|5 years ago|reply
I've seen this in person, and almost every year I visit the museum and have the same reaction. I stand there in wonder looking at it for about 30 minutes. The connection to the past world feels absolutely visceral. You can get very close to it, and it is never too busy around the museum as it is so large. If you ever get a chance to visit this part of Canada (Drumheller), and particularly this museum, you should go for it.
[+] igrekel|5 years ago|reply
I second this! I visited the Tyrrel museum in Drumheller and the Dinosaur provincial park that's near Patricia as a young adult about 20 years ago and it is still imprinted in my memory.

I had seen dinosaur skeletons in museums before but it didn't compare. Also guided tours through the limited access of the park were amazing, almost surreal, with fossils of dinosaur bones just popping out of the ground now and then plus the chance of seeing active digs.

[+] danans|5 years ago|reply
> it was an enormous four-legged herbivore protected by a spiky, plated armor. It weighed approximately 3,000 pounds.

> To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it still weighs 2,500 pounds!

How does it weight less as a stone fossil than as an organic life form mostly made of water?

Most stone is 2-3 times as dense as water

https://www.thoughtco.com/densities-of-common-rocks-and-mine...

[+] JadeNB|5 years ago|reply
> How does it weight less as a stone fossil than as an organic life form mostly made of water?

> Most stone is 2-3 times as dense as water

Presumably because the water was completely filling a volume, whereas the stone is very much not.

[+] skykooler|5 years ago|reply
Because it wasn't fossilized; it's mostly original material.
[+] smcameron|5 years ago|reply
Only half of it is there. The back half of the thing is gone.
[+] pvaldes|5 years ago|reply
> How does it weight less as a stone fossil than as an organic life

Because you are comparing different things. The fossil comprises only the anterior part of the animal. The tail and posterior legs are missing.

[+] tpmx|5 years ago|reply
Why did this Canadian energy company (Suncor) react to this properly? Theories? Surely there'd be immense economic pressure to just keep digging.

(Am I being too cynical?)

[+] ozborn|5 years ago|reply
There's a number of reasons I think, including: 1. The fossil itself is beautiful and outstanding

2. There is less pressure to produce right now given oversupply and shipping constraints in Alberta

3.Suncor cares more about its reputation than some of the other players in the tar sands

4. The Royal Tyrell Museum is well known to most Albertans, kids go there on school trips and it would likely seem like the obvious thing to do (stop work) when presented with such a find.

5. I have no idea if there is a finders fee, but that fossil is probably more valuable than anything that loader was processing all day.

6. It's a dinosaur - most folks find them pretty cool. :)

[+] visiblink|5 years ago|reply
This is completely speculative, but Suncor was filthy rich in 2011, so a temporary stoppage wouldn't have hurt the bottom line too much. Also, because of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, dinosaur fossils have become a part of Alberta's identity. The miners would have talked about the find and the company would have faced bad publicity if it had acted differently. Oil sands companies don't really need any more bad publicity than they already get.
[+] eternauta3k|5 years ago|reply
Now think of all the fossils and historical artifacts we're not hearing about because they just kept digging.
[+] Ericson2314|5 years ago|reply
Obligatory question: DNA?
[+] teraflop|5 years ago|reply
Not likely. According to the research I've seen, the half-life of DNA nucleotide bonds in fossilized samples is on the order of a few hundred thousand years. But that's the half-life of each bond, which means sequences of non-trivial length will become fragmented much more quickly. After 110 million years, it seems very unlikely that anything sequenceable still exists, even in trace amounts.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...

[+] jbay808|5 years ago|reply
An interesting question might be, assuming this animal has some descendants alive today, has its original gene sequence been better preserved in that heritage than within its own body?
[+] ericlewis|5 years ago|reply
DNA half-life basically wouldn’t be able to survive this long, no matter how well preserved I believe.
[+] octocop|5 years ago|reply
110 million years old feels like a shoot from the hip. How do they estimate the age of something like this?
[+] osamagirl69|5 years ago|reply
Usually using radiometric dating. Carbon-14 has too short of a halflife (~5000 years) to be useful for fossils, but potassium-40 has a long enough halflife (~1.2 billion years) that it can be used to date minerals going back to the formation of the earths crust--it has even been used to estimate when the moon was formed (4-5 billion years ago)!
[+] codeisawesome|5 years ago|reply
Wow. It's really no surprise that people in the past imagined dragons! With no theories around fossilisation, biological/geographical eons, evolution etc., imagine finding something like this (even just an exoskeleton fragment!)
[+] wincy|5 years ago|reply
Wow this is amazing! So exciting to see stuff like this.
[+] dopylitty|5 years ago|reply
It looks like an ancestor of the denosaur, which seems to be a much more advanced/evolved take on the same general design.
[+] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
Must had been a very hostile world if you had to be that armored just to eat plants.
[+] WorldPeas|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if they recovered any vegetation samples from its digestive system
[+] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
Saw this in person at the Tyrell museum. Pretty cool.
[+] smashah|5 years ago|reply
Umm don't you mean denosaur??
[+] smashah|5 years ago|reply
This is a solid NodeJS joke. Can't believe I got downvoted. Probably by a know-nothing wannaVC.
[+] runjake|5 years ago|reply
This article appears to be from 2017. There isn't any new information on the nodosaur specimen.
[+] dorkwood|5 years ago|reply
Always a red flag when an article doesn't put a date of publication anywhere on the page.
[+] SmallPeePeeMan|5 years ago|reply
> To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it still weighs 2,500 pounds!

Why is that relevant? Tissue has been replaced by minerals which presumably are much denser than flesh.