March 21, 2011 was just a regular work day for Shawn Funk, a heavy-equipment operator who, in his 12 years of digging, had unearthed fossilized wood and the occasional petrified tree stump, but never the remains of an animal, especially not a dinosaur. 

But everything at Millennium Mine changed that day as Funk, along with his supervisor, Mike Gratton, stumbled upon oddly coloured lumps. They were both quite confused because they’d never seen anything like it. But the lumps revealed an unusual pattern – row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in a gunmetal grey stone.

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“Right away, Mike was like, ‘We gotta get this checked out,’” Funk said in a 2011 interview. “It was definitely nothing we had ever seen before.”

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It turned out to be a 110-million-year-old horned and armoured, tank-like dinosaur in nearly perfectly preserved condition. “It was like a ‘Game of Thrones’ dragon,” Robert Clark, who photographed the fossil for National Geographic said. “It was so dimensional, like a prop from a movie.”

According to National Geographic, the new species of Nodosaur, an armoured dinosaur, weighed about 3,000 pounds and was an herbivore that walked on four legs. Quite close to the estimated weight, the remains totalled up to about 2,500 pounds. 

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Scientists believe that the dinosaur drowned after it was swept to the sea. The thing that helped preserve it in a life-like state for millions of years was the fact minerals took the place of its scaly skin. 

The researcher spent about 7,000 hours to piece together the fossilized remains and the whole thing was unveiled at the Royal Tyrrell Museum as part of the “Ground for Discovery” exhibit last week. 

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“We don’t just have a skeleton,” Caleb Brown, a researcher at the museum, told National Geographic. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.”

Original Story – National Geographic