In 2011, archaeologists uncovered one of the most — if not the most — pristine dinosaur fossils yet: a near-whole ankylosaur, complete with its jagged spikes, most of its limbs, armor coating, and some of its guts and stomach contents. The most amazing detail, though? Its uncannily preserved face and skin.
It took Mark Mitchell, a technician at Royal Tyrell Museum, an absurd 7,000 hours and nearly six years to meticulously exhume the fossil by delicately chipping away at the surrounding stone. For his efforts, he had the newly discovered specie of nodosaur — a type of ankylosaur — named after him: Borealopelta markmitchelli.
“During preparation, I would piece together the blocks like a puzzle, and the animal started to really take shape,” Mitchell said in a new interview with Ars Technica, describing the painstaking process.
