This Fossilized Skin Sample of an Iconic Dinosaur Has Revealed Jaw-Dropping Details - ScienceAlert

A new artist's reconstruction of Carnotaurus, with scaly skin.

"By looking at the skin from the shoulders, belly and tail regions, we discovered that the skin of this dinosaur was more diverse than previously thought, consisting of large and randomly distributed conical studs surrounded by a network of small elongated, diamond-shaped or subcircular scales," describes paleontologist Christophe Hendrickx from the Unidad Ejecutora Lillo in San Miguel de Tucumán.

rex and the horned abelisaurid, really did seem to have scaly, lizard-like skin.

Here, the smallest scale measures only 20 millimeters in diameter, and yet sometimes these tiny flakes of skin can be found smooshed between other scales twice as large.

These much bigger, feature scales are almost domed in appearance, akin to the domed scales found on Diplodocus – a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur. Others are shaped more like diamonds, with much longer lengths than widths; these resemble the scales seen on tyrannosaurids that also lived in the Late Cretaceous, roughly 70 million years ago.

In 1997, scientists suggested the large, conical scales found on Carnotaurus existed for "some degree of protection during confrontation", but the authors of this new analysis say these scales would do little good against teeth.

"Alternatively, in Carnotaurus and more broadly among dinosaurs, feature scales may simply have served a display/coloration function," they suggest.

"While we do not claim that Carnotaurus and elephants necessarily thermoregulated in the same ways (i.e. using evaporative cooling), we note here that they share distinct gross morphological similarities in their integument, despite one having scales and the other having a highly modified mammalian epidermis," the authors write