‘Rock’ Is Fossilized Dinosaur Skin

More than anything else, dinosaur skin feels like a mountain bike tire - rough, thick and bumpy, with somewhat symmetrical clumps of little crimped-edged knobs.

An extraordinary fossil discovery is letting scientists reach back 70 million years to touch an impression of the skin of one of the massive beasts.

“We’ve got the first dinosaur petting zoo in North America here,” Spencer Lucas said Wednesday. He is a paleontologist at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

“I would feel real excited to touch that,” said 10-year-old museum visitor Nicholas Coleman-Watkin, when he heard about the discovery.

The fossilized skin of a duck-billed dinosaur was discovered five years ago by a graduate student who was studying rocks, not dinosaurs, near Deming in southern New Mexico.

It wasn’t until last year that researchers began to suspect the 10-foot-long, 2-foot-wide textured rock was not just fossilized tree bark.

“This is really weird,” said Lucas, cradling a chunk of the fossil in his lap during a museum news conference announcing the find. “It’s so weird that as a trained paleontologist I didn’t know what the hell it was for five years.”

Lucas said it is one of only about a dozen duck-billed dinosaur skin impressions discovered anywhere in the world. Its appearance is similar to the others, but scientists said they don’t know yet how closely it might have been related to them.

Scientists estimate that the dinosaur that left the impression of part of its tail was 20 to 25 feet long. They hope the site will give them clues to how tissue such as skin can be fossilized.