The dinosaur at the bottom of the sea

A digger in a Canadian mine, far from any ocean, hits a dinosaur.

Armour plates spill out onto the ground, still locked in rock.

But 110 million years ago, this rock was seafloor. And this dinosaur lived on land.

So it came here dead, carried off by a river.

Gas swelled the rotting body. It floated out to sea, belly up.

For days it drifted. Then it burst, and sank on its back into the mud.

The mud buried it fast, before anything could eat it.

Even its stomach survived: a lump the size of a soccer ball.

Inside were chewed ferns, and flecks of charcoal.

Charcoal means fire. And after a fire, ferns are often the first plants back.

So it was grazing a burned forest, on new ferns rising from the ash.

No one knows what killed it. But 110 million years later, its last meal is still inside it.

What we flag in the script

• How it reached the sea is the majority view. National Geographic, the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the 2018 “bloat-and-float” study (Mallon and colleagues) and the research team’s own coverage describe a carcass that was already dead and floating. Larramendi, Paul and Hsu (2020) doubted it: they argued that ankylosaurs were too dense to float that way, and that this one was washed out to sea and drowned. Our fact-check couldn’t open that paper, so this is how Wikipedia reports it.
• Who, where and when. The dinosaur is the armoured nodosaur Borealopelta. The digger’s operator was Shawn Funk, at the Millennium Mine in Alberta, on 21 March 2011. The rock is 110 to 112 million years old, marine rock of the Clearwater Formation.
• The stomach. About 88% of it is chewed leaf material, mostly fern, and about 6% is charcoal.
• The season is left out. The sources don’t agree on it: one says early to mid-summer, another late spring to mid-summer.