The skin of a duck-billed dinosaur pokes out of the soil at Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota.

The 67-million-year old "dino mummy," nicknamed Dakota, was discovered in 1999 by then-teenage paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family's North Dakota property. (Read about another dinosaur mummy found in Montana.)

Much of Dakota's fossilized skin has maintained its texture, allowing scientists to map it in 3-D and get a better picture of how duck-billed dinosaurs may have appeared.

"There seems to be a variation in scale size that might possibly correlate—as it does in modern reptiles in many cases—with changes in color," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Britain's University of Manchester and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee.

"And there seems to be striping patterns associated with joint areas on the arm," he added.

(Check out pictures of other bizarre-looking dinos.)

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