The Dinosaur Found With Its Last Meal Still Inside

In March 2011, a heavy-equipment operator named Shawn Funk was digging at the Millennium Mine near Fort McMurray, Alberta, when his machine struck something that wasn't rock.

What he had found was an armoured dinosaur, roughly 110 million years old, preserved in a way that palaeontologists usually only dream about. It was a nodosaur — a four-legged, plant-eating dinosaur covered in spiked armour plates, a relative of the more famous ankylosaurs, but without the tail club.

Normally, dinosaur fossils are bones and not much else. This one came out as an animal. It had been buried rapidly in marine sediment after drowning, and the result was a three-dimensional body with skin, armour plates and keratin sheaths still in position. It took more than 7,000 hours of careful preparation to expose it. The species was named Borealopelta markmitchelli in 2017, after the technician who did much of that work.

Two findings made it scientifically exceptional.

First, its stomach contents were preserved — the remains of ferns, leaves and stems, along with charcoal. That is a direct record of what the animal ate, not an inference from its teeth, and the charcoal suggested it had been browsing in an area that had recently burned.

Second, chemical analysis found traces of reddish-brown pigment in the skin. Combined with the pattern of the armour, that indicated countershading — a darker back and lighter underside — which is camouflage. A dinosaur the size of a small car, covered in spikes, was apparently hiding from something.

It is on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. The most remarkable fossil of its kind was found not by a scientific expedition, but by a man operating a digger who stopped when the machine hit something that didn't feel right.