Have any fossilized whole skulls of dinosaurs ever been found? ‎Hagit.‎

The original question: I would like to know how many whole skulls of dinosaurs have been found to date? Has any dinosaur been found at its entirety, body and skull included? Has a body been found in close proximity to its skull? If not found in close proximity, how is the body associated with the head? Hagit. .

We will start off by saying that the life of the paleontologist is not easy at all. The paleontologist has to find fossils buried inside a rocky layer in the ground, with only the hard body parts (mostly bones) fossilized. Thus, it is very rare to come across a skeleton of a whole dinosaur, though that does occur from time to time.

In contrast, tooth fossils are relatively widespread since the teeth are covered with an enamel layer, which strengthens them and makes them more resistant to the damages of time. Actually, the first dinosaur fossil to ever be discovered and defined was a fossilized tooth. This fossil was found by the wife of  Gideon Algernon Mantell, an English doctor and amateur geologist, who looked at the interesting stone and almost immediately deduced it is a tooth of a large reptile that lived in the Mesozoic era. Since the tooth resembled that of an iguana, the first dinosaur to be discovered was given the name “Iguanodon”.

It really is not that simple. Researches do this by relying on the location in which the fossil was found, the shape of the bones and teeth, and comparison to more complete skeletons that are already familiar to the researchers and were already discovered in the area. Evidently, the first attempts to reconstruct dinosaur skeletons seems today to be a bit funny, since the researches did not have anything to rely on. The first model of the Iguanodon kind of resembles a dog, and its famous toe nail was stuck to its nose. The Stegosaurus was first assembled with its back plates covering it like roof shingles.  

Regarding the number of skeletons found to date – that is a great question since the number of complete components is relatively small (the average dinosaur has about a hundred different bones). Currently it is estimated that around 2,100 “good skeletons” have been found, and the number of known species stands on a few hundreds (300-500). Therefore, even if we still have not found the entire skeleton, but have found other individuals from the same species, we have a good chance of completing the picture. In addition, researchers in many occasions rely on the bone structure of contemporary reptiles and birds, which are the descendants of the dinosaurs and their distant relatives.

Another type of dinosaur fossil is the type in which the body of the animal has not decomposed, but was washed away into a body of water and was covered in mud. These fossils are called “mummies”, and traces of fossilized soft tissues, such as muscle and even skin, can be detected in them. To date, only a few dinosaur mummies have been found. 

The method of working with this type of fossils is different than that of classical paleontology. In this case, the researcher replaces his chisel and hammer with MRI machines and computerized imaging software. In addition, the bones of the animal are not dug out of the ground, but the whole chunk of rock is taken out. The chunk is casted so it will not deteriorate, and then it is entered into a CT machine, which is also used for airplanes. In this manner, it is possible to image the internal tissues of the fossilized animal. 

More about mummies – a video from the Discovery Channel's Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy: Analysis of the mummy of the hadrosaur Leonardo, with the paleontologist, Bob Becker: 

Article translated from Hebrew by Elee Shimshoni, PhD student at the Weizmann Institute of Science.