Just in time for Halloween, we’re learning how "mummies" are helping us better understand some dinosaurs.
Paleontologists with the University of Chicago went to a “mummy zone” in the Badlands of Wyoming, where they excavated fossils of two new duck-billed dinosaurs covered in a thin layer of clay.
Professor of organismal biology and anatomy Paul Sereno says the biofilm preserved them like mummies, but without any organic material left behind.
“One hundredth of an inch thick. That came to the surface of the skin immediately after it buried and that is what is left. It’s a mask. It’s a Halloween mask and it is so perfect” he described it to WBBM.
Using CT scans and other technology, his team of scientists used the clay to reconstruct the scales, crests and hooves of hadrosaurs that roamed the earth 66 million years ago.
Sereno says it’s the first proof we have that dinosaurs had hooves.
The paleontologist details the find and shares an illustration of the dinosaur in the journal Science.
The paper says a few years after duck-billed dinosaurs were found in the Badlands of Wyoming in 1908, they were nicknamed mummies because of how well they were preserved.