Complete Head of Carnotaurus, maybe?

[Dinoguy2]

Thought this might be of interest to some forum members. Looks like a new paleo legend is being born on Twitter surrounding a mysterious photo that appears to show a complete head (not skull, but head, complete with mineralized flesh and keratin) of Carnotaurus.

People are probably rightly dancing around the speculation in these threads to avoid damaging any reputations. But it MAY be that when Bonaparte excavated the Carno holotype, he did not care about soft tissue and ordered the soft tissue stripped in order to better study the skull anatomy. The original paper says that more skin "impressions" were found but accidentally destroyed during excavation. Rmor on this thread is it was not an accident.

Or... what we're seeing might just be a lot of hematite concretion that looks like a scaly face. I don't quite buy this suggestion because even though the paper says the holotype was found inside a dense hematite concretion, you can clearly see big chunks of hematite covering the right side of the "face" and they look quite different from the underlying "skin".

We'll probably never know. But if that is actually a mineralized head of a Carno "mummy", it looks pretty incredible from this pic, and suggests a different orientation for the horns than we're used to seeing. They appear to be fairly blunt and down-curving due to the keratin(?) extensions. It also appears to preserve fairly extensive lips.

Whatever it is, it looks really creepy to me. Combined with the grainy old photo, it's got sort of a cryptid vibe to it. Also reminds me of the demon dogs in Ghostbusters a little 

https://twitter.com/TetZoo/status/1196814405004091392

[Loon]

I remember I first heard about the well-preserved head on Your Dinosaurs are Wrong. If this is the same thing, the skin impressions have since been destroyed, I believe.

[Faelrin]

Thanks for sharing D @Dinoguy2.

I was already crushed from when I found out the skin there was destroyed, but now at least with this pic surfacing, this may be the closest thing we get to looking at any of that, unless our species ever gets lucky in finding another. Of course to my untrained eye, I'm not really if sure what I'm looking there was preserved tissue at all, although I can only hope so.

I wonder where this pic surfaced from and if any of the original team that worked on this discovery can be reached out too, to learn more about what we are seeing here?

[Silvanusaurus]

Extremely compelling though I'm finding it hard to grasp clearly what I'm looking at without more angles... so tantalising...

[Dinoguy2]

Extremely compelling though I'm finding it hard to grasp clearly what I'm looking at without more angles... so tantalising...

Not sure if this helps much because it's just an ink sketch, but this tweet has a reconstruction based on the photo. Note that the photo shows only the upper skull, no lower jaw.

https://twitter.com/mpmartyniuk/status/1197212906200408064?s=19

[TheCambrianCrusader]

Does anyone know how they got a hold of that picture??

[Takama]

And From that Second Link

[Silvanusaurus]

Extremely compelling though I'm finding it hard to grasp clearly what I'm looking at without more angles... so tantalising...

Not sure if this helps much because it's just an ink sketch, but this tweet has a reconstruction based on the photo. Note that the photo shows only the upper skull, no lower jaw.

https://twitter.com/mpmartyniuk/status/1197212906200408064?s=19

Thanks, that does make sense of it, that is what I would have guessed was visible in the photo but I wasn't sure about the jaw being there or not. I'd have thought with a find like that you'd take more than one photograph, I wonder if they are still out there somewhere waiting to be found...

[Shonisaurus]

For the carnotaurus was not exactly with that appearance a mixture of carnivorous dinosaur and demon. Sincerely, the new aspect favors you and makes you more exotic and attractive.

[John]

If it is skin impressions we are seeing on the skull,then it looks like the question of whether or not theropods had lips has been answered with a big yes in the case of Carnotaurus.And if Carnotaurus had them,that makes it more likely that all other theropods including Tyrannosaurus rex had them too.If were are not just seeing hematite concretion that is.

[dyno77]

To be fair im not surprised because iv read about other dinosaurs with fossilized skin impressions that during excavation were discarded or fell apart ,leaving only the fossilized skeleton.

[Funk]

We'll probably never know, could just be rock matrix, but Bonaparte did have a reputation for being pretty heavy handed with the fossils he excavated... The chapter about him in the book "Hunting dinosaurs" is very critical of his methods, it appears he damaged the first Argentinosaurus specimen before it was named.