
110M year-old nodosaur is the best-preserved fossil of its kind (2017) - djsumdog
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/
======
dmix
Previously, with better pictures:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913)
(2017; 117 comments)

~~~
dang
Plus with comments from the author of the article.

Ok, we'll change from [https://www.earthlymission.com/dinosaur-mummy-science-
discov...](https://www.earthlymission.com/dinosaur-mummy-science-discovery-
nodosaur-intact-canada/) to
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-
nodosaur-fossil-discovery/). Thanks!

~~~
cheerlessbog
The NG article is pay walled.

~~~
dang
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the
thread. There's at least one in this thread.

This is in the FAQ at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and there's more explanation here:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20paywalls&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

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cknoxrun
I've seen this in person, and almost every year I visit the museum and have
the same reaction. I stand there in wonder looking at it for about 30 minutes.
The connection to the past world feels absolutely visceral. You can get very
close to it, and it is never too busy around the museum as it is so large. If
you ever get a chance to visit this part of Canada (Drumheller), and
particularly this museum, you should go for it.

~~~
igrekel
I second this! I visited the Tyrrel museum in Drumheller and the Dinosaur
provincial park that's near Patricia as a young adult about 20 years ago and
it is still imprinted in my memory.

I had seen dinosaur skeletons in museums before but it didn't compare. Also
guided tours through the limited access of the park were amazing, almost
surreal, with fossils of dinosaur bones just popping out of the ground now and
then plus the chance of seeing active digs.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
When we were kids we used to canoe down the Red Deer river in the badlands
area, with a fellow from my parent's canoe club who was a retired geologist.
(I grew up in central Alberta and my parents were pretty serious canoers, they
usually did faster moving whitewater but once in a while we'd do the Red Deer
just for us kids) My sister and I would have our minds blown by him as he
explained every rock to us. I doubt you could do what we did now, we'd climb
all over the hoodoos and find fossils all over (mostly bison bones, but still
the odd fossil.) We never took them home, and I believe anything of import was
either given to the museum or he told them about it.

Lots of neat little caves, bones all over. Very awesome place. Especially when
you're a dinosaur obsessed 8 year old.

There was one time we were going down the river and there was a cow on the
bank stuck in the mud up almost up to its neck. I remember the adults going to
find the rancher and a lot of fuss and the cow was eventually saved.

~~~
igrekel
That sounds like an excellent idea for a trip. I'd love to do that with my
kid, it would awesome.

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danans
> it was an enormous four-legged herbivore protected by a spiky, plated armor.
> It weighed approximately 3,000 pounds.

> To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it still weighs
> 2,500 pounds!

How does it weight less as a stone fossil than as an organic life form mostly
made of water?

Most stone is 2-3 times as dense as water

[https://www.thoughtco.com/densities-of-common-rocks-and-
mine...](https://www.thoughtco.com/densities-of-common-rocks-and-
minerals-1439119)

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

~~~
catalogia
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.

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neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171223121530/http://www.nation...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171223121530/http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-
nodosaur-fossil-discovery/)

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tpmx
Why did this Canadian energy company (Suncor) react to this properly?
Theories? Surely there'd be immense economic pressure to just keep digging.

(Am I being too cynical?)

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giarc
Suncor was right in the midst of a big investigation into 500 ducks that died
in a tailings pond. Might have played a role.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/syncrude-suncor-
clear...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/syncrude-suncor-cleared-
after-duck-death-investigation-1.1271299)

~~~
tpmx
That sounds like a plausible reason. Timeline checks out.

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Ericson2314
Obligatory question: DNA?

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teraflop
Not likely. According to the research I've seen, the half-life of DNA
nucleotide bonds in fossilized samples is on the order of a few hundred
thousand years. But that's the half-life of _each_ bond, which means sequences
of non-trivial length will become fragmented much more quickly. After 110
million years, it seems very unlikely that anything sequenceable still exists,
even in trace amounts.

[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.1745)

~~~
staticautomatic
Could someone knowledgeable in pchem explain how this works? I'm guessing that
half of the substance doesn't deterministically decay after a specific amount
of time. I imagine that the decay follows some probability distribution, which
should mean some portion of the substance decays much faster or slower, right?
Does some of it never decay at all?

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
See link to previous discussion, posted above

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913)

Might help.

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octocop
110 million years old feels like a shoot from the hip. How do they estimate
the age of something like this?

~~~
osamagirl69
Usually using radiometric dating. Carbon-14 has too short of a halflife (~5000
years) to be useful for fossils, but potassium-40 has a long enough halflife
(~1.2 billion years) that it can be used to date minerals going back to the
formation of the earths crust--it has even been used to estimate when the moon
was formed (4-5 billion years ago)!

~~~
close04
Radiometric dating is also used on the layers around the fossil. In this case
of the hydrocarbon deposit [0].

[0]
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293)

------
codeisawesome
Wow. It's really no surprise that people in the past imagined dragons! With no
theories around fossilisation, biological/geographical eons, evolution etc.,
imagine finding something like this (even just an exoskeleton fragment!)

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wincy
Wow this is amazing! So exciting to see stuff like this.

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dopylitty
It looks like an ancestor of the denosaur, which seems to be a much more
advanced/evolved take on the same general design.

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29athrowaway
Must had been a very hostile world if you had to be that armored just to eat
plants.

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WorldPeas
I wonder if they recovered any vegetation samples from its digestive system

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cmrdporcupine
Saw this in person at the Tyrell museum. Pretty cool.

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smashah
Umm don't you mean denosaur??

~~~
smashah
This is a solid NodeJS joke. Can't believe I got downvoted. Probably by a
know-nothing wannaVC.

~~~
runnr_az
Agreed. Came here to make the same joke, which means it must be funny.

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jquave
Paywalled

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runjake
This article appears to be from 2017. There isn't any new information on the
nodosaur specimen.

~~~
alecb
Yah, it's also a clumsy plagiarization of our article:
[https://allthatsinteresting.com/nodosaur-dinosaur-
mummy](https://allthatsinteresting.com/nodosaur-dinosaur-mummy)

It looks like their site is another on the list that lifts our articles and
recirculates them on social media.

~~~
eloff
@dang can we change the link to this one to give credit to the source? And add
2017 tag.

~~~
dang
We've changed from [https://www.earthlymission.com/dinosaur-mummy-science-
discov...](https://www.earthlymission.com/dinosaur-mummy-science-discovery-
nodosaur-intact-canada/) to the original source.

------
dorkwood
Always a red flag when an article doesn't put a date of publication anywhere
on the page.

------
SmallPeePeeMan
> To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it still weighs
> 2,500 pounds!

Why is that relevant? Tissue has been replaced by minerals which presumably
are much denser than flesh.

~~~
dang
Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they basically troll every
thread they post to. This one's admittedly only mildly trollish, but still.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20trollish%20username&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20trollish%20username&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0)

We've banned this account for now, but if you want to email hn@ycombinator.com
with a better username, we can rename it for you and unban it.

