Up Close & Peculiar: Diving Into All Things Dinosaur

Hello everyone! Today is a little different because we are taking a look at a huge piece! This is a section, mostly the tail and part of the spine, of a hadrosaurid, or a duck-billed dinosaur. I genuinely cannot believe this is a real thing that I’m looking at. If just the tail is this big, I cannot even imagine how big the whole dino was! 

As if standing in front of a twenty-foot dinosaur tail wasn’t cool enough, what’s even cooler about this piece is that there is actually mummified skin and tendons on this thing, as you can see here! Finding soft tissue preserved like this is unbelievably rare.

We can tell a little bit more about this dino’s story by looking at what paleontologists believe are bite marks or scars, which tell us that the tail was being used defensively, or even that a T-Rex might have bitten it off in the heat of a battle!

Staying in the world of dinosaurs, I also have with me these dino footprints!  We don’t know exactly what type of dinosaur left these tracks, but I feel like these kind of look like prehistoric chicken feet, except this chicken would definitely eat me for dinner instead of the other way around! 

Would you have liked to have met these dinosaurs? Let us know in the comments and I’ll see you next time!