4 ms·

Because it wasn't fossilized; it's mostly original material.

• danans 6y ago
  Wow, that's wild, almost like Black Swan wild. I was so predisposed to assume fossils are solid stone that I missed that. Still, living things are mostly water, and I doubt the mummified 2500 pounds is mostly water. Another response to my question suggests that just the outer shell is stone in the inside is empty. In that case, the mass is coming from the stone shell, and is not very analogous to the living animal's mass, which still makes the phrasing in the article a bit dubious. Perhaps though it contains some original carbon that can be used to do some very old radiocarbon dating, which could improve geological strata based dating of other fossil finds.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• catalogia 6y ago
  As far as I can gather, that's not true and the soft tissue was in fact mineralized. Dinosaur "mummies" are fossils of mummies. This dinosaur 'mummy' is fairly unique insofar the soft tissue was mineralized without first being desiccated. Chemical traces of things like pigmentation can remain in fossilized soft tissue, I suppose that counts as "original material", but this thing isn't made out of meat anymore.
• throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Sadly I don't believe that's possible. It would be beyond fantastic if it were.