Wyoming dinosaur mummies give us a new view of duck-billed species

As a result Edmontosaurus The image has been updated again. Some of the updates were quite striking.

Tender elephants

Sereno's team analyzed the newly discovered Edmontosaurus mummies using modern imaging techniques such as CT scans, X-rays, photogrammetry and more. “We created a detailed model of the skin and wrapped it around the skeleton—some of this technology was not available even 10 years ago,” says Sereno. The result was an updated Edmontosaurus image including changes in the ridge, spines, and appearance of the skin. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that he has hooves on his legs.

It turned out that both Knight and Horner were partly right about the appearance Edmontosaurus back. The fleshy ridge, as Knight depicted it, actually began at the top of the head and extended back along the spine. The difference was that at some point this ridge turned into a row of spikes, as depicted in Horner's version. The spines were similar to those found on modern chameleons, where each spine corresponds one to one to the vertebra underneath it.

“Another thing that was stunning about Edmontosaurus “These are the kind of scales you'd find on a lizard, and we're talking about an animal the size of an elephant,” Sereno adds. The skin covered by these ultra-small scales was also incredibly thin, which the team inferred from the wrinkles they found on their scales. images.

And then the hooves appeared. “In the hoof, the nail wraps around the toe and wraps around the underside of the toe in a wedge shape,” Sereno explains. Edmontosaurus the front legs had single central hooves with a “frog-like” triangular elastic structure on the underside. “They were very similar to horse hooves, so obviously they weren't invented by mammals,” Sereno says. “Dinosaurs had them.” On the other hand, the hind legs, which supported most of the animal's weight, had three wedge-shaped hooves spanning three toes and a fleshy rear-facing heel, a structure found in modern rhinoceroses.