This 110 million-year-old, armored plant-eater is the best preserved fossil of its kind ever found.
From the article:
The more I look at it, the more mind-boggling it becomes. Fossilized remnants of skin still cover the bumpy armor plates dotting the animal’s skull. Its right forefoot lies by its side, its five digits splayed upward. I can count the scales on its sole. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, grins at my astonishment. “We don’t just have a skeleton,” he tells me later. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.”
Read more on Michael Greshko’s (beautifully written) article at National Geographic.
Holy fucking shit.
“The Canadian specimen literally defies words, in more ways than one. As this article went to press, museum staff were finalizing the creature’s scientific description and hadn’t yet settled on a common name for it. (“Mrs. Prickley,” a reference to a Canadian sketch comedy character, didn’t stick.”
HOLY SHIT AN ACTUAL GODDAMNED DINOSAUR