Our photographer couldn't believe his eyes when he first saw the fossil—and neither will you, once you see these exclusive pictures.
It takes a lot to wow photographer Robert Clark.
Over his illustrious career, Clark has photographed more than 40 stories for National Geographic magazine, specialising in capturing the distant past of life and culture. He shot China’s exquisite feathered-dinosaur fossils. He watched researchers autopsy Ötzi the Iceman, the famous 5,000-year-old frozen mummy. And he took intimate portraits of people who lived and died 2,300 years ago—their leathery faces preserved in a bog.
But when he travelled to Alberta’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology last December and first laid eyes on his next photographic subject, he laughed.
Clark was staring at an 110 million-year-old fossil of a nodosaur, a type of plant-eating armoured dinosaur. Its resting place undersea had helped fossilise the dinosaur’s armour, patches of its skin, some of its soft tissue—and what are likely remnants of the dinosaur’s last meal.
Discovered by an observant miner in 2011 and publicly unveiled on May 12, 2017, the fossil is the best-preserved nodosaur ever found, and arguably one of the most visually arresting fossils unearthed in decades.
