Washington: Scientists working at the Tanis dig site in North Dakota, USA, have discovered an almost perfectly preserved leg from a Thescelosaurus, complete with skin.
Those working at the site believe it was killed and entombed on the day of a giant asteroid strike 66 million years ago that brought about the end of the dinosaurs. That impact is believed to have taken place in the Gulf of Mexico, some 2,500 miles away from Tanis, but was still powerful enough to cause a surge of water that buried all those living in what is now the Upper Midwest state.
“It’s a Thescelosaurus. It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly, like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries,” Prof Paul Barrett, a world-leading expert on herbivorous dinosaurs from London’s Natural History Museum, told the BBC.
“This looks like an animal whose leg has simply been ripped off really quickly. There’s no evidence on the leg of disease, there are no obvious pathologies, there’s no trace of the leg being scavenged, such as bite marks or bits of it that are missing.”
“So, the best idea that we have is that this is an animal that died more or less instantaneously.”
If, as is believed, the fossil is from the day of the strike, it will represent a huge breakthrough for the scientific community. Exceedingly, few fossils that can be dated to within even the final few thousand years before impact have ever been discovered, the British Telegraph newspaper reported.