Ankylosaur armor could likely withstand the impact of a high-speed car crash, the best-preserved dinosaur fossil on record has revealed. The fossil belonged to a nodosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur that could grow to be 18 feet (5.5 meters) long and lived about 110 to 112 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous.
The fossil was so well preserved that scientists were able to determine the strength of keratin plates and the bony spikes that covered them. "This thing could tank an F150 going at speed," study co-author Michael Habib , a biomechanical paleontologist at UCLA, told Live Science. Habib presented his findings on the nodosaur armor Oct.
30 at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting. Only the bony spikes remained on other fossils from armored dinosaurs. This is because keratin — the dead cells that make up structures like hair and fingernails — doesn't fossilize well.
So, when researching armored dinosaurs like nodosaurs and stegosaurs, paleontologists assumed that the dinosaurs' main protection from predators came from the bony structures of armor left behind in the fossil and that this armor may have been covered by a thin layer of keratin like a turtle shell. Related: Sleeping dragon: How this Dinosaur got preserved in 3D But in 2017, an exceptionally well-preserved fossil of a newly identified species of nodosaur, Borealopelta markmitchelli , was found in a mine in Alberta, Canada. "It's stunningly beautiful, just extremely well preserved," .
