Tyler Keillor / Fossil Lab

You might not think a paleontologist looking for 66-million-year-old fossils would need to ask a rancher about his great-grandmother's job in the Wyoming badlands. But that's what Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, did when he was trying to track down a historic site where a famous dinosaur mummy was found in 1908.

Sereno's work, published in the journal Science , brings new clarity about the appearance of the duck-billed Edmontosaurus annectens , a massive herbivore from the Cretaceous period. Sereno and his team's painstaking work reveals the dinosaur's hooves and spiky tail in exquisite detail. They studied how a fragile clay template can create dinosaur "mummies."

But first they had to find them.

"It involved sleuthing a

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