Hadrosaurs: Two Mummies, Two Surprises

Field discovery keeps contradicting
theoretical certainty—and revealing
wonder. Creation demands
to be read, not rewritten.

by John D. Wise, PhD

I. Two Mummies, Two Surprises

Ed Senior and Ed Junior—two newly described hadrosaur fossils from the Cretaceous badlands—are quietly reshaping what paleontologists thought they knew about “dinosaur mummies.”

Scientific American, “Fossilized skin on dinosaur ‘mummies’ isn’t skin at all,” October 23, 2025. The fossil skin imprints “aren’t fossilized flesh at all but clay molds welded by microbes as the creatures decayed.”

“That’s going to come as a shocker to a lot of people,” says University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno. The clay-molding process, long known to preserve the form of soft animals in oxygen-poor settings, “was never imagined to work its magic on a dinosaur buried suddenly by sand in a flooded river”—an environment normally rich in oxygen.

From National Geographic, “How did these dinosaurs become ‘mummies’? 2 new fossils help solve the mystery,” October 23, 2025:

The Ed Senior specimen preserves the first example of a hind foot from this duck-billed species, including toe bones and a keratin sheath of hoof… [It] also showcases scales and wrinkles along the dinosaur’s back.

Behind both reports stands the new Science journal paper that inspired them, “Duck-billed dinosaur fleshy midline and hooves reveal terrestrial clay-template ‘mummification,’” 23 October, 2025:

Reptilian biped with hooves.

“Hooves, the anatomical hallmark of living “ungulates,” characterize the fore- and hindfeet of several subgroups of modern placental mammals.… By contrast, end-Cretaceous Edmontosaurus annectens preserves the oldest hoof renderings for any tetrapod—the first record of hooves in a reptile, the first instance of a hooved tetrapod capable of bipedal locomotion, and the first hooved tetrapod with disparate fore- and hindfoot posture.” [Emphasis added.]

In Wyoming’s badlands, these two remarkably preserved duck-bills overturn more than one assumption. First, what looked like soft tissue is not “preserved” flesh at all but a clay cast—a microbially mediated impression formed as biofilms captured the body’s outline while the carcass decayed. Second, where textbooks once showed Edmontosaurus with claws and webbed feet—a ponderous reptile wading through Cretaceous swamps—the new fossils reveal something else entirely: hooves.

Instead of claws splayed for swimming, the digits were bound inside a solid, weight-bearing pad—the kind of structure seen in animals built for open ground. The “duck-bill,” it turns out, was no swamp-dweller but a grazer of dry uplands, its limbs fitted for steady travel rather than sloshing through mud, or so we must think now.

It is a small anatomical change with large consequences. For more than a century, hadrosaurs have been portrayed as evolutionary intermediates—lumbering, semi-aquatic reptiles bridging water and land. Now they appear more like the herbivorous mammals that, in the evolutionary story, would one day replace them: sure-footed, fast, and social.

A reptile with hooves feels like a contradiction in terms—and yet here it stands, preserved in stone.

II. Ignorance in the Guise of Knowledge

• Evolutionists once imagined Edmontosaurus sloshing through swamps, a scaly relic halfway between land and water.
• They imagined Homo neanderthalensis stooped and speechless, the half-ape ancestor of modern humanity.

Both images have dissolved—not because the record changed, but because the stories had to in light of new evidence.

Each new find corrects the last, yet each correction arrives with the air of finality: now we know. It’s an old rhythm—hypothesis hardens into “fact,” then is humbled by fresh data, but humility all too soon gives way to a new, and often arrogant certitude.

Across the past century, that confidence has never faltered. The scientist still stands before each fossil, pronouncing the riddle solved. Yet the hoofed dinosaur and the humanized caveman whisper otherwise: theories fossilize into “facts” far faster than bone (even those containing soft-tissue) into stone.

The deeper researchers dig, the more our categories falter.

Must see Short Reel explains the “fake certainty” in evolutionary claims. Watch it now and share!

Dinosaurs once thought cold-blooded show evidence of rapid metabolism; creatures imagined as solitary reveal herding and nesting behavior. Each discovery loosens another rung in the evolutionary ladder that once seemed so tidy. The more complete the record becomes, the less it resembles the caricature of reptiles marching toward mammalhood—and yet the grand narrative remains beyond question.

Darwinian blinders cause them to imagine: “If it exists, it evolved.”

It is worth noting that the desiccation model itself, though framed as a taphonomic refinement, also performs an interpretive duty within the prevailing paradigm. For decades, the lifelike “death pose” of many dinosaur mummies—arched necks, splayed limbs, even the telltale tippy-toe stance—has been cited by creationists as evidence of rapid death and burial in catastrophic flood conditions. The new microbial clay-templating model softens that implication by proposing a slower, surface-level process that fits long geological timescales.

Whether or not that was the authors’ intent, the effect is the same: a phenomenon once seen as catastrophic rapid burial is reabsorbed into uniformitarian continuity. Yet even here, the Science paper acknowledges a local flood as the immediate burial mechanism. This is not just Derek Ager, but YEC having an impact.

It is a reminder that in scientific writing, explanations can defend frameworks as deftly as they describe facts.

For all its instruments and computational modeling, evolutionary biology remains a storytelling venture. It cannot look backward in time; it can only predict a past it never saw. Every reconstruction, every refinement, is a confession in miniature: we were not there, but this is what we think happened.

If only the humility in that final phrase—we think—were conserved.

The fossil record remains itself: silent, precise, eloquent in its own way, waiting for us to ask better questions and to walk more carefully over the ground we claim to know. To call a hoofed dinosaur a “reptile,” or a tool-making Neanderthal “primitive,” is to measure reality by theory rather than to test theory by reality.

As Socrates was so fond of reminding us, ignorance, when comfortable, still wears the mask of knowledge.

And so, as David Coppedge has chronicled here at CEH for a quarter century, field discovery keeps contradicting theoretical certainty—and revealing wonder.

Creation demands to be read, not rewritten.

John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.