Magnificently preserved Canadian dinosaur gets a name and a backstory

An extraordinarily well-preserved 110-million-year-old dinosaur found in a mine pit in Canada now has a name and evidence of a troubled past, researchers said Thursday.

With fossilised skin and scales, the dragon-like creature is actually a new kind of nodosaur, coined Borealopelta markmitchelli, after the museum technician Mark Mitchell who spent more than 7,000 hours painstakingly removing rock from around the specimen.

The report in the journal Current Biology described it as “the best-preserved armoured dinosaur ever found, and one of the best dinosaur specimens in the world.”

The 5.5-metre-long creature was first discovered in 2011 by a mining machine operator named Shawn Funk, who was working at the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta.

The entire animal would have weighed more than 1,300kg. The portion recovered spans from the snout to the hips.

Unlike most dinosaur specimens, which consist of skeletons or bone fragments, this one is three-dimensional and covered in preserved, scaly skin.