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  • 2018-12-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Is This a Photograph of a 'Mummified' Dinosaur? (en)
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  • In December 2018, a photograph went viral on Twitter that depicted a so-called mummified dinosaur discovered in 2011 in Alberta, Canada. The specimen was said to be approximately 110 million years old: Other tweets proffered different images of the same dinosaur, as well as links to articles on NationalGeographic.com and Smithsonianmag.com detailing the discovery: The photographs are real. Taken at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, they document a fossilized specimen of a plant-eating dinosaur from the Cretaceous period, described in a June 2017 article in National Geographic as follows: NationalGeographic.com offers a 3-dimensional, virtual tour of the nodosaur fossil, which is considered remarkable by paleontologists because it's the best preserved specimen of its kind ever discovered: When the nodosaur died, its 18-foot-long carcass was apparently washed into an inland sea, scientists say, where it sank to the bottom and was eventually petrified inside and out by the minerals in the water and sediment covering it. The location (no longer covered by water) is now a mining site in what are known as the Athabasca oil sands. In media interviews, researchers participating in both the excavation and preservation of the find described the specimen as mummified. One of those scientists was Don Brinkman, director of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, who characterized it in remarks to the New York Times as basically a dinosaur mummy. Mummy is a word not often applied to dinosaur fossils, however, a fact that prompted confusion and debate in online discussions about the exhibit. One such conversation took place on Reddit.com, where a user objected in noting that No, it's fossilized not mummified. The difference is that the soft tissues got fossilized as well, instead of just the skeleton. Another user replied to say: Well, in order to get to this state it would have first become mummified and then fossilized. The reason soft tissue is so rarely preserved is because it relies on natural mummification in some sort of anoxic environment to prevent decay over the time fossilization takes. We reached out to some of the scientists at Tyrrell for clarification on their use of the term but did not receive a response by press time. Our own research suggests that the explanation above is essentially correct, however. In paleontological terms, mummification occurs when the soft tissues of a specimen are preserved under conditions that arrest the normal process of decomposition before fossilization takes place. We tend to associate mummification with extremely dry conditions, but it can also take place in moist environments inhospitable to scavengers and microbes, as paleontologist Caleb Brown explained in May 2017: A fossilized dinosaur that underwent a similar process of underwater mummification was discovered in North Dakota in 2006. It was said at the time to be one of only a handful of mummified dinosaur fossils known to exist, and that remains true today, according to Brown: (en)
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