Rare dinosaur mummies are helping scientists recreate what these creatures might have looked like

NEW YORK – Researchers have discovered a terrifying pair of dinosaur mummies that appear to be preserved in an unexpected way.

The remains of these dinosaurs Different from encased Egyptian mummies or natural human mummies that are accidentally preserved in swamps or deserts.

Mummified dinosaurs are so old that their skin and soft tissues have fossilized.

Scientists are using these rare remains, along with dinosaur bones, to recreate what these prehistoric creatures looked like.

Scientists have been discovering dinosaur mummies for more than a century. Some were buried quickly after death, while others drowned in bodies of water or dried out.

Many of them — including a duck-billed dinosaur mummy discovered in 1908 — hail from an area in eastern Wyoming.

In the new study, scientists returned to the so-called mummy area and found new remains, including the mummy of a duck-billed dinosaur, which was only a few years old when it died.

“This is the first truly mummified dinosaur baby,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who was involved in the discovery.

Surprisingly, the new mummies seem to have been preserved without any evidence of fossilized skin.

Instead, they left impressions of their skin and scales on a thin layer of clay that had hardened with the help of microbes.

This style of mummification has preserved other organisms before, but scientists did not think it could happen on Earth.

It’s possible that other mummies found at the Wyoming site were formed in a similar way, Serino said.

Scientists used these clay casts to paint a clearer picture of what duck-billed dinosaurs looked like when they were alive, including the nails on their tails and hooves on their feet.

The new results were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Understanding how dinosaur mummies formed could help scientists discover more of them.

Mateusz Vosek, a paleontologist at Misericordia University who was not involved in the discovery, said it was important to look not only for dinosaur bones, but also for impressions of skin and soft tissue that could go unstudied or even be captured.

More mummies provide more insights into how these creatures grew and lived.

“Every time we find one, there’s a treasure trove of information about these animals,” said Stephanie Drumheller, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was not involved in the study.