Notes specific to this specimen: We learn a lot of stuff from studying the animals and plants of the past. Here’s a great example – It’s a little-known fact that bipedal dinosaurs were far more well-adapted to walking upright than humans have ever been. Modern medicine does, in fact, utilize this important attribute: When the time comes to stabilize someone’s back injury, doctors sometimes attach reinforcement rods to the vertebrae in the injured area and fuse it together with the bone. This exact type of reinforcement is something dinosaurs had already developed 200 million years ago!

At our site in Wyoming we excavated mostly the bones of Edmontosaurus, a bipedal ornithischian dinosaur from the late Cretaceous. In the bonebed we found lots of backbones and, with them, hundreds of pieces of ossified tendon which Edmontosaurus had crisscrossing their vertebrae. These tendons strengthened and reinforced the skeleton, stabilizing their backbone especially in the area of the pelvis. Here we are offering genuine pieces of ossified tendon – mounted on the very matrix we dug it out of – dug directly out of our site in Wyoming. It’s a piece of human history and ancient natural history as well.

SIZE: (box) 3″ x 3″

NAME: Edmontosaurus
AGE: Cretaceous Period – 68 million years
UNIT: Lance Creek Formation
SITE: Lance Creek, Wyoming

DATE: Early 1990’s

Documentation: This authentic fossil specimen comes with a Certificate of Authenticity and Origin.