Anton Sugar
Member
Whoa.
On March 21, 2011, Shawn Funk was digging in Albertas Millennium Mine with a mechanical backhoe, when he hit something much harder than the surrounding rock. A closer look revealed something that looked like no rock Funk had ever seen, just row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.
What he had found was a 2,500-pound dinosaur fossil, which was soon shipped to the museum in Alberta, where technicians scraped extraneous rock from the fossilized bone and experts examined the specimen.
A close-up of the nodosaur fossil. The dinosaurs head is clearly visible. (Robert Clark/ National Geographic)
I couldnt believe my eyes it was a dinosaur, Donald Henderson, the curator of dinosaurs at the museum, told Alberta Oil. When we first saw the pictures we were convinced we were going to see another plesiosaur (a more commonly discovered marine reptile).
More specifically, it was the snout-to-hips portion of a nodosaur, a member of the heavily-armored ankylosaur subgroup, that roamed during the Cretaceous Period, according to Smithsonian. This group of heavy herbivores, which walked on four legs, likely resembled a cross between a lizard and a lion but covered in scales.
