Mummified fossil represents first description of a soft-tissue crest atop a dinosaur's head.
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| Illustration courtesy Phil R. Bell, Federico Fanti, Philip J. Currie, and Victoria M. Arbour, Current Biology |
A rare, mummified specimen of the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosauraus regalis shows for the first time that those dinosaurs' heads were adorned with a fleshy comb, most similar to the roosters' red crest.
The structure above the fossil's head was so unexpected that Phil Bell put his chisel straight through the middle of it. "I was just expecting there to be rock, and all of a sudden there was skin underneath, and I thought to myself, 'Whoops,'" he said. What Bell had found was the first dinosaur fossil with a fleshy crest atop its head.
"We know that lots of dinosaurs had different kinds of head ornaments, but these are all made of bones," said Bell, a paleontologist at the University of New England, Australia. "There's never been any indication that any dinosaurs had something like this, so this was totally out of left field," he said.
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