michaelgreshko

4 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by michaelgreshko 9y ago

   Personally, I've not seen any evidence that ankylosaurs (including nodosaurs) had feathers. But who knows?
2. 2.▲
   by michaelgreshko 9y ago

   What zbyte64 said. Once the animal dies, the enzymes that constantly fix and error-check DNA are no longer around. DNA then degrades over time, cleaving in half every ~521 years on average. So past a million years or two, the fragments are
3. 3.▲
   by michaelgreshko 9y ago

   Thanks. Interestingly, this is the first large fossil like this that Suncor had run across, in all the digging they had done up in the oil sands. And as you can imagine, finding a land animal like this nodosaur in the middle of what would&#
4. 4.▲
   by michaelgreshko 9y ago

   Hey, I'm the journalist who wrote the story. A few things: - The organic-rich film preserving the outlines of scales (so, yes, fossilized skin) is only a few millimeters thick. So Mitchell had to prepare the fossil extremely slowly i