Thread: The Amazing Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada

Just thought I'd share this. A few years old. Ran into it on Instagram and never heard about it. Not reconstructed but actually preserved. Just gonna post a couple of paragraphs and a link. The pic below isn't in the story. You can google nodosaurus and find a bunch of pics. Pretty amazing.
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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...




The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada

Now that would be cool.

Wow! I love discoveries like this!

We have had mastodon discoveries here in Michigan.