| A dinosaur mummy with hooves |
| Dinosaur "mummies" found in Wyoming offer paleontologists an outline of the animal's soft tissue—a rarity for fossilized remains that old. The find then threw paleontologists a curveball: hooves. (Surprise!) The fossil—less an mummy in the ancient Egyptian sense and more a painstakingly preserved clay mask of one-hundredth of an inch thick—reveals the juvenile Edmontosaurus annectens has:
"For once we know what a large dinosaur looks like from head to toe," Paleontologist Paul Sereno told NPR's Bill Chappell. "We know it, and you could depict it, and it's accurate." (No, they don't know the color.) NPR has the full piece, including the story of how a rancher's great-grandmother helped Sereno found "the mummy zone," in a Wyoming town that "doesn't exist on any map." |