Badlands yield major dinosaur find

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- A fossil-hunting high school student is being credited with discovering an extremely rare mummified dinosaur in the badlands of his native North Dakota.

Nicknamed Dakota, soft tissue from the 25-foot hadrosaur located by Tyler Lyson is expected to yield many new clues about the size, body mechanics and appearance of the beasts that ruled the Earth millions of years ago, The Washington Post reported Monday.

"It just defies logic that such a remarkable specimen could preserve," says Phillip Manning, a paleontologist from the University of Manchester in England who is heading the study of Dakota.

A life-long dinosaur enthusiast, Lyson was in high school when he noticed some bone fragments at the base of a hill that would lead to what scientists are calling the most complete and best-preserved mummified dinosaurs unearthed in nearly a century.

"I figured the excavation would take two or three weeks, I'd have a hadrosaur tail, it would make a nice museum piece, but scientifically, it would not be that impressive," says Lyson, currently a graduate student in paleontology at Yale University.