it’s called the Hell Creek Formation but
two paleontologists this part of North
Dakota is pure heaven all those
dinosaurs that led happy fruitful lives
here on these ancient floodplains
also died here
making hell creak a hotbed for fossils
Leeson has walked just about every inch
of this land it’s been in his family for
decades and he’s been hunting fossils on
it since he was practically a toddler at
25 he has already headed 60 excavations
but even that couldn’t have prepared him
for what he was about to find protruding
from that rocky hillside
I followed the bone fragments of the
little gully and I saw two spinal bones
sticking out of the hill Leeson rounded
up his crew and began excavating the
site removing more and more rocks and
dirt he realized there was a whole lot
more to these fossils than just bones I
knocked off a little piece of what I
thought was just sandstone and I looked
at it and it had a weird pattern to it
and so I brought the piece of sandstone
back to the lab and after hours and
hours of slowly brushing it the scale
started to appear
Leeson held in his hands the scaly skin
of an animal that had been extinct for
65 million years the skin hadn’t clapped
sin around the bone at that point I knew
that we had a 3d dinosaur mummy I was
absolutely thrilled our mummy now dubbed
Dakota after its home turf is a fossil
like other dinosaurs but unlike
reconstructed museum skeletons what’s
extraordinary is that Dakota seems to
have fossilized with most of its skin
and organs intact so that is the actual
skin envelope here as well yeah they
come up to and then it’s draped over
there it’s more massively deep the tile
yeah much deeper than any tale of ever
this animal had a big ass it’s huge
that’s a surprise so surprising that
compared to earlier estimates the large
skin envelope has ballooned our animals
rear end more than 25% we’ve had 150
nearly 200 years of people looking at
this particular animal saying that’s
what it looks like we’ve been wrong as
more and more specks of rock get
carefully chipped away Dakota gives us a
more complete picture each tin to its
arms and tail alternating bands of large
and small scales provide telltale signs
of how this animal may have really
looked
along the back runs one of the most
exciting finds a continuous frill from
the pelvis to the tail the first
preserved in a hadrosaur mummy 10 feet
of it have been uncovered so far these
frills may have helped Dakota recognize
its own kind
one of Dakota’s arms has emerged from
the tail block as well and it’s a real
surprise much heftier and more muscular
than expected the arm may have been very
strong raising the possibility that
Dakota may have run on 4 feet as well as
on 2
and now the most intriguing hunk of
Dakota the body lies ready to reveal its
secrets
the preparator ‘s have meticulously
stripped three feet of rock from the
body and are just now hitting skin
somewhere in here tyler is convinced is
his real prize a skull with its soft
tissue intact we’re almost there I can
see the light at the end of the tunnel
which is a good thing because it’s been
a long tunnel
this single specimen has brought us
closer than we’ve ever been to
understanding where these animals live
how they look how they moved and how
they survived into the afterlife
two paleontologists this part of North
Dakota is pure heaven all those
dinosaurs that led happy fruitful lives
here on these ancient floodplains
also died here
making hell creak a hotbed for fossils
Leeson has walked just about every inch
of this land it’s been in his family for
decades and he’s been hunting fossils on
it since he was practically a toddler at
25 he has already headed 60 excavations
but even that couldn’t have prepared him
for what he was about to find protruding
from that rocky hillside
I followed the bone fragments of the
little gully and I saw two spinal bones
sticking out of the hill Leeson rounded
up his crew and began excavating the
site removing more and more rocks and
dirt he realized there was a whole lot
more to these fossils than just bones I
knocked off a little piece of what I
thought was just sandstone and I looked
at it and it had a weird pattern to it
and so I brought the piece of sandstone
back to the lab and after hours and
hours of slowly brushing it the scale
started to appear
Leeson held in his hands the scaly skin
of an animal that had been extinct for
65 million years the skin hadn’t clapped
sin around the bone at that point I knew
that we had a 3d dinosaur mummy I was
absolutely thrilled our mummy now dubbed
Dakota after its home turf is a fossil
like other dinosaurs but unlike
reconstructed museum skeletons what’s
extraordinary is that Dakota seems to
have fossilized with most of its skin
and organs intact so that is the actual
skin envelope here as well yeah they
come up to and then it’s draped over
there it’s more massively deep the tile
yeah much deeper than any tale of ever
this animal had a big ass it’s huge
that’s a surprise so surprising that
compared to earlier estimates the large
skin envelope has ballooned our animals
rear end more than 25% we’ve had 150
nearly 200 years of people looking at
this particular animal saying that’s
what it looks like we’ve been wrong as
more and more specks of rock get
carefully chipped away Dakota gives us a
more complete picture each tin to its
arms and tail alternating bands of large
and small scales provide telltale signs
of how this animal may have really
looked
along the back runs one of the most
exciting finds a continuous frill from
the pelvis to the tail the first
preserved in a hadrosaur mummy 10 feet
of it have been uncovered so far these
frills may have helped Dakota recognize
its own kind
one of Dakota’s arms has emerged from
the tail block as well and it’s a real
surprise much heftier and more muscular
than expected the arm may have been very
strong raising the possibility that
Dakota may have run on 4 feet as well as
on 2
and now the most intriguing hunk of
Dakota the body lies ready to reveal its
secrets
the preparator ‘s have meticulously
stripped three feet of rock from the
body and are just now hitting skin
somewhere in here tyler is convinced is
his real prize a skull with its soft
tissue intact we’re almost there I can
see the light at the end of the tunnel
which is a good thing because it’s been
a long tunnel
this single specimen has brought us
closer than we’ve ever been to
understanding where these animals live
how they look how they moved and how
they survived into the afterlife
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