Fossil Mummy Dinosaur

No, it doesn't eat brains: that would be a fossil zombie dinosaur. From The Washington Post:

A high school student hunting fossils in the badlands of his native North Dakota discovered an extremely rare mummified dinosaur that includes not just bones but also seldom seen fossilized soft tissue such as skin and muscles, scientists will announce today.

...."He looks like a blow-up dinosaur in some parts," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England who is leading the inquiry. "When you actually look at the detail of the skin, the scales themselves are three dimensional. . . . The arm is breathtaking. It's a three-dimensional arm, you can shake the dinosaur by the hand. It just defies logic that such a remarkable specimen could preserve."

Although it is described as "mummified," the 65 million-year-old duckbilled dinosaur that scientists have named Dakota bears no similarity to the leather-skinned human mummies retrieved from ancient tombs in Egypt. Time long ago transformed Dakota's soft tissue into mineralized rock, preserving it for the ages.

...Already, the scientists say they have made fascinating discoveries. The skin around the tail and on large swaths of the body appears generally in its original shape rather than squashed flat against the bones, giving researchers a three-dimensional look at Dakota. They can see both legs and arms and the chest cavity. The head and neck are not visible, but the researchers think they may be folded within the body block. They do not know whether the internal organs are there, nor have they determined the creature's sex, although they refer to it as a male.

The scientists have felt the scales near Dakota's elbow, noticing that they vary in size -- an indication, perhaps, of changes in skin color, texture or flexibility. They found a fleshy pad on its palm, an indication that it did not permanently walk on all fours, and keratin hooves on its feet.

The areas of uncollapsed skin have aided researchers in reconstructing Dakota's muscle sizes and allowed them to see, for instance, that a hadrosaur's backside was about 25 percent larger than previously thought. They estimate that Dakota could run as fast as 28 mph, faster than a Tyrannosaurus rex, the top predator of the time.

Now, if devoured brains that would be really cool...