Jurassic Park anyone?"This specimen exceeds the jackpot," said excavation leader Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Britain's University of Manchester and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee.
Most dinosaurs are known only from their bones, which are seldom found joined together as they would be in real life.
But "we're looking at a three-dimensional skin envelope," Manning said. "In many places it's complete and intact—around the tail, arms, and legs and part of the body."
The 3-D preservation of the skin has also prompted the researchers to search for traces of unfossilized soft tissue in the hopes that it might yield protein.
This April, for example, two teams announced the successful extraction and analysis of collagen, a bone protein, from 68-million-year-old T. rex fossils. Those findings supported the hypothesis that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs.
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