michaelgreshko

Personally, I've not seen any evidence that ankylosaurs (including nodosaurs) had feathers. But who knows?

What zbyte64 said. Once the animal dies, the enzymes that constantly fix and error-check DNA are no longer around. DNA then degrades over time, cleaving in half every ~521 years on average. So past a million years or two, the fragments are so small, meaningfully putting them back together would be an impossible task, like reconstructing a porcelain bowl you had ground into dust.

Thanks. Interestingly, this is the first large fossil like this that Suncor had run across, in all the digging they had done up in the oil sands. And as you can imagine, finding a land animal like this nodosaur in the middle of what would've been a shallow sea is extraordinarily unlikely. Other mining companies have found other fossils in similar formations, though usually of non-dinosaur marine reptiles (e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/ancient-sea-monster-b...).

Hey, I'm the journalist who wrote the story. A few things: - The organic-rich film preserving the outlines of scales (so, yes, fossilized skin) is only a few millimeters thick. So Mitchell had to prepare the fossil extremely slowly in order to follow the film through the matrix. - The half-life of DNA is ~521 years at 13.1°C, as found in this 2012 paper: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724 The team's model predicts higher half-lifes at truly freezing temperatures, but even at the extreme end, there's no way DNA would survive 110 million years. - The dating on the site is well constrained to ~110 million years old. The fossil was found in the Wabiskaw Member of the Clearwater Formation, a well-dated rock formation in Alberta. The underlying oil sands have been radiometrically dated to 112±5.3 million years old. (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293)