This is more than bones and fossilized feces: the fossilized skin of this dinosaur found in northeastern China (Liaoning Province) even had a wound, and it is by now the best sample of dinosaur skin.

The 130-million-year-old Psittacosaurus (parrot lizard) was a sheep sized beaked dino, forebear of the later more famous horned dinosaurs, like Triceratops and its relatives. This fossilized dino had a bite wound on its lower left side coming from a predator or could have been bitten by a scavenger when it was already dead. The astonishing fact is that the wound preserved for so long the inner skin structure (the dermis).

The new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals that most dinosaurs had thick, scaly skin resembling modern-day reptiles.

"To have soft tissue preserved is amazing in the fossil record, because clearly the soft tissue is about the first thing that will decay and disintegrate. Until now we had seen only surface preservations, but this is the first time we see a deep cross-section of the skin cut away at right angles to the surface," co-author Theagarten Lingham-Soliar of South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal said.

"The excellent preservation of the newfound Psittacosaurus may have been a consequence of rapid burial and speedy mineralization of the soft tissue before it began to decompose. The animal's skin was at least 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) thick, with some 40 layers of a fibrous protein called collagen, making it ideal for defense against predators. But the thick skin was still able to stretch and flex to accommodate swelling in the belly from a heavy diet of plants and fibers," Lingham-Soliar added.

It appears that the Psittacosaurus bore bristles of collagen fibers, not feathers, like some Theropoda dinosaurs, related to birds.

"What is unexpected is the 40-plus layers of collagen, which even in thinner-skinned meat-eating dinosaurs would comprise many layers of fibers with the potential of being misidentified as proto-feathers," Lingham-Soliar also added.

This affirmation is nonsense, as Psittacosaurus belongs to Ornithopoda, an evolutionary branch of the dinosaurs, which includes duck billed and horned dinosaurs, while the meat eaters belongs to a different evolutionary branch, called Sauropoda (forming the group called Theropoda), thus this discovery is not very relevant about the meat eating dinosaurs.

"There is a preponderance of evidence to support that birds came from dinosaurs known as theropods. [Lingham-Soliar] has tried for some time to argue that the featherlike structures on the theropod dinosaurs from the same formation as [where] the Psittacosaurus [was found] are collagen fibers, too. However, many of the Chinese theropods have complex structures that clearly cannot be explained away in that fashion," Hans-Dieter Sues, associate director for research and collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. told National Geographic News.