A world populated by dragons is normally the sort of thing reserved for fantasy literature, but sometimes we’re reminded that our own planet was once crawling with massive reptiles. That was certainly the case for some Canadian miners who chanced across an amazing dinosaur ‘mummy’:
On the afternoon of March 21, 2011, a heavy-equipment operator named Shawn Funk was carving his way through the earth, unaware that he would soon meet a dragon.
That Monday had started like any other at the Millennium Mine, a vast pit some 17 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, operated by energy company Suncor. Hour after hour Funk’s towering excavator gobbled its way down to sands laced with bitumen—the transmogrified remains of marine plants and creatures that lived and died more than 110 million years ago. It was the only ancient life he regularly saw. In 12 years of digging he had stumbled across fossilized wood and the occasional petrified tree stump, but never the remains of an animal—and certainly no dinosaurs.
But around 1:30, Funk’s bucket clipped something much harder than the surrounding rock. 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.’
What they had found was the petrified, almost perfectly preserved remains of a 110 million-year-old dinosaur known as a Nodosaur. In fact, it is so well preserved that paleobiologist Jakob Vinther remarked that, at first appearance, you could assume it “might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago”.
Head over to National Geographic for the full story and more pics.
