I. I have traveled the world. I just want to see this dinosaur.
I’ve seen the Colosseum in Rome. I’ve had high tea in London, and paella in Valencia, but no matter how grateful I am for those experiences, all I want is a pilgrimage to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, to see Borealopelta.
Borealopelta Markmitchelli is my favorite dinosaur specimen to date, and because I feel so very parasocial about her, I will be using she/her pronouns to describe the specimen.
When it’s easy to see dinosaurs as monsters from a movie, or diagrams in a textbook, she is the one who makes me realize that dinos were each individual creatures no less significant than myself.
I found her through the wonderful ecosystem that is dinosaur TikTok, where I have discovered that there are roughly two ways to make a dinosaur edit. One involves epic music, dramatic slow-motion shots, and the utmost emphasis on bite force.
It’s almost as if the creator is trying to seduce you or enlist you in a prehistoric military campaign. The soundtrack is invariably some combination of Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. The other involves a kind, armored dinosaur and people in the comments section talking about her like she is a beloved elderly neighbor.
I belong to the second camp. I have found my people there, among the dinosaur enthusiasts who get excited about fossilized stomach contents, preserved skin, and what a creature’s body can tell us about how it lived. There is something really endearing to me about a corner of the internet that can geek out with me over a dinosaur’s lunch.
II. Dinosaur mummies
Borealopelta was a nodosaur, a type of armored dinosaur, and she lived approximately 110 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous. What makes her so magical is her preservation includes extensive skin impressions, armor, keratinous coverings, and even stomach contents.
It’s for these reasons among many that my girl earned herself a Guinness World Record. To someone who is less dino-pilled than I, the difference between a normal fossilized skeleton and a so-called dinosaur mummy may need some explaining. Most fossils look like the ones you see in museums – consisting mostly of fragmented bits of bones and teeth.
In contrast, borealopelta’s exceptional soft-tissue preservation retains details of her outer body that normally disappears during decay. Her preserved outer tissues (skin, scales, etc.) mean that she’s in her original package, obscuring much of the underlying skeleton, making her look remarkably like a sleeping animal rather than a collection of bones.
III. How she dressed for a prehistoric knife fight
One fact that is very dear to me is her nomenclature. Borealopelta means “northern shield,” referencing her Canadian identity and impressively armored body. The armor was both functional biology and a spectacular physical feature, making her look like a creature designed by someone with a very dramatic imagination.
Unlike many of her Ankylosaurus cousins, Borealopelta did not have a tail club. She was a nodosaur with prominent shoulder spines and other bony armor. Some of her armor structures were made of keratin, the same protein found in human hair and nails.
In my opinion, she must’ve been the world’s most intimidating forest-floor resident considering these armor plates could withstand 125,000 joules of force per square meter. Her nearly bulletproof vest could take far more force than any dinosaur predators’ bite of the time. This points to the fact that she was a fighter!
She may have used her thick skin to defend against other borealopeltas’ large shoulder spikes. She’s giving tank, and she is SO well preserved that she left chemical traces associated with pigments which told paleo-experts she was likely a reddish-brown hue with a white underbelly.
So next time you think you’ve nailed your skincare routine, just remember that hers has survived longer than all of civilization.
IV. Her last meal order
Scientists have analyzed Borealopelta’s preserved stomach contents, allowing them to investigate what she actually ate. A large proportion of the identifiable plant material consisted of leaves, particularly leptosporangiate ferns. She also had charcoal and swallowed stones in her stomach… I won’t yuck her yum.
The concentration of particular leaves, despite the availability of other vegetation, suggests she was feeding selectively. Let the record show that calling her a picky eater, or a fighter is my own interpretation, not a formal paleontological diagnosis. Still, I like imagining her wandering through Cretaceous with an extremely particular idea of what constituted a good meal.
What gets me is that we can know this at all. Someone can look at the preserved contents of a dinosaur’s stomach and reconstruct something about its diet and the season in which it lived.
The leaves she ate have outlasted entire ecosystems. Something mundane like lunch has become evidence of a world that disappeared long before humans existed.
I think this is what I love about paleontology. It makes the ordinary extraordinary without having to invent anything new. Borealopelta didn’t need to be the biggest, fastest, or most frightening dinosaur alive. She ate something, and somehow, against almost every expectation, we can still find traces of it.
I find that more moving than any prehistoric bite-force statistic.
V. The most terrible thing happened to the most perfect creature
Borealopelta lived on dry land in what is now Alberta, but her remains were eventually deposited in sediments at the bottom of the ancient Western Interior Seaway.
Researchers believe her body was washed out to sea, where the conditions helped preserve her in extraordinary detail. The exact circumstances of her death remain uncertain, which is something I have to remind myself of whenever I start imagining her final hours.
Despite everything that might have happened to her, I think she looks as calm as my roommate’s cat sleeping beside me while I do homework. There is something about the way her body has been preserved that makes her seem like a being might get up and wander off if I stopped looking.
I know that isn’t what happened. I know I am looking at a fossil, at the remains of a creature whose world vanished 110 million years ago. But I can’t help thinking about the fact that she had an ordinary existence before she became extraordinary to us.
She ate. She moved through her environment. She occupied space on this planet, and then she didn’t.
I am choosing to believe she would have liked me. We both seem to appreciate a quiet afternoon and a good vegetable snack. I know that I am projecting a little. That is part of the point.
I cannot recover her personality from her fossil, and I don’t want to pretend I can. What I can recover is evidence of her life, and that evidence is enough to make me feel something for an animal I will never meet.
VII. Why I want to see her in person
In my opinion, Borealopelta feels so different from any other museum artifact. She is not a monument built by people, but rather evidence of a life that existed long before humans. Fossils preserve physical evidence of ancient organisms, while the surrounding geological record helps researchers reconstruct the environments in which they lived and died.
I can’t help but daydream about how the land has changed over millions of years, while the same planet still holds our lives today. Seeing a picture of her makes that feel real, but I want the experience of standing in front of the actual specimen and for a moment feeling that we coexist and experience a connection to deep time.
And listen… I am not saying I would cry in front of her display case, but I am saying that I would like for them to supply lotion tissues in the exhibit.
VIII. Conclusion: Once, the world was hers
I keep returning to the meaning of “northern shield.” Her armor protected a living animal, and her exceptional preservation protects evidence of that animal’s existence for us.
Because of her stomach contents, skin, and armor, I can now turn an ancient creature into something recognizable and intimate in my mind; a salad order, or catnap. Borealopelta’s fossil makes the past feel less distant, even if we can never know everything about her life.
When all my problems feel huge, I rest well knowing that the same planet that held Borealopelta’s world holds ours, and that, for a little while, the world was hers.