At right is a reconstruction of what the skin of hadrosaur Edmontosaurus annectens might have looked like, based on the famous hadrosaur mummy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. (Illustration by Patrick Lynch)
In life, Tyrannosaurus rex usually got the best of the less fearsome duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs: T. rex ate them. But in death, the plant-eating hadrosaurs have proved more resilient than their carnivorous predators - and apparently all other dinosaurs - at least by the measure of their skin. In an exhaustive new survey of dinosaur skin samples and a related statistical analysis, Matt Davis of Yale University documents the prevalence of hadrosaur skin among all known dinosaur skin fossils, and offers a new explanation for it: Hadrosaur skin was tougher. "If you are a hadrosaur versus another dinosaur, you're 31 times more likely to preserve skin," said Davis, a fifth-year graduate student in paleontology at Yale and the author of a paper published in the Sept. 10 print issue of the journal Acta Paleontologica Polonica. Previous explanations for the relative abundance of hadrosaur skin fossils attributed it to the sheer number of hadrosaurs among all dinosaurs. Hadrosaurs - many species of which are characterized by protuberant crests on their heads - were among the most common worldwide.
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