An associate may have put it best, Ken Stadtman said. Rubbing the slab of golden stone is "as close that you're going to come to petting a dinosaur."
Stadtman, curator of Brigham Young University's Earth Science Museum, was referring to astonishing slabs of golden-colored stone, which were excavated at the Book Cliffs of central Utah and taken to the museum.The slabs carry impressions of dinosaur skin, among the world's rarest and most interesting fossils. Also found were some of the animal's fossilized bones and tendons.
Skin impressions from the site have been known since 1992, when the hadrosaur fossil was discovered by Brian Anderson, then a graduate student at the University of California at Riverside, and his field assistant, Roger Wagerle. But until now, only a small amount of the fossil had been removed.
Last summer the rest of the material was excavated and lifted from the region by a Utah Army National Guard helicopter.
BYU was the logical repository for the fossil treasure because it is within 100 miles of the site. Paleontologists said another reason for its going there was the expertise of Stadtman.
Scientists at BYU were able to determine that the remains were of an adult that was not yet fully grown. The beast was about 19 feet long, they believe. It lived during the Cretaceous era, 75 million to 80 million years ago.
This weekend a team of paleontologists from Utah, California, North Carolina and Arizona are meeting at the Earth Science Museum to write an interdisciplinary paper on the discovery. Among them is Anderson.
Members of the team are calling the find a fossil bonanza.
"Most of the previously described skin impressions are bits and pieces," said Mary Droser, a paleontologist at the University of California at Riverside who was among those who decided the find would be worth excavating.
"Ours are completely different; our skin impressions are continuous sheets several meters long.
"As we worked, I saw a visual image of a real animal, one that had not been subject to significant scavenging."
Stadtman added, "It was like being in Cretaceous Park."
The curator told the Deseret News that the study has been exciting "right from the original discovery because it's the first skin impression that I've personally been able to work with and view up close."
Asked whether any of the creature remains at the site, he said, "We got it all."
Besides skin, tendons and some marine animal burrows that were found in the same rock formation, the scientists were able to recover portions of the dinosaur's skeleton. The tooth-bearing section of the lower jaw, called a dental battery, identified it as a hadrosaur, also called a duckbill dinosaur.
"They had a very characteristic tooth structure (with) multiple teeth in rows," he said. The dentition shows "it was a hadrosaur without doubt," he said.
Special conditions were required to preserve anything as delicate as dinosaur skin.
"I would like to get a piece of this out in our exhibit area," he said of the museum. "It's really quite interesting and amazing."