SASKATOON -- Paleontologists unearthed a rare piece of dinosaur skin, linked to the edmontosaurus, a duck-billed herbivore, which roamed western Canada around 72 million years ago.

"Finding dinosaur skin in impressions is rare but that's just the impression," said Mauricio Barbi, physics professor with the University of Regina. "But what we found is even rarer, it's because it's the real skin … so it's extremely rare, only few specimens of the same kind of preservation have been found."

In 2012, trekking through the Alberta badlands alongside paleontologist Philip Currie and Phil bell, Barbi said he was shocked at what they discovered. 

"This sort of thing is extremely rare to find and the condition of preservation is absolutely astonishing," Barbi said in a news release. 

Barbi and his team took the rare dinosaur skin, believed to be 70 million years old, to the Canadian light source at the University of Saskatchewan to examine the piece of skin at an atomic and molecular level with the use of the synchrotron light. 

"We used electron microscopes and the Canadian light source synchrotron to develop images of the sample," Barbi said. 

"Not only optical images but also chemical images so then what we found was layers of organized semi-circular structures and through chemical analysis we saw that it consisted of carbon and the carbon is mostly in organic form."

The team also used the CLS to compare the dinosaur skin with the skin of modern animals including a crocodile, rat and chicken. Barbi said this is the first time this has ever been done at this level. 

"We study the evolution based on what animals looked like and we can guess how things were based on bones and impressions of ligaments and imprints left in materials such as mud, but this is the first time we could directly compare the layout of cell layers in dinosaurs to living creatures," he said, adding this skin very closely resembles the skin of a modern crocodile. "This helps us understand how animals evolved."

Barbi added that by looking at the distribution and the localization of the structure it's such that you have the scales of the dinosaur, like crocodile-scales, and right under those scales there's like a real skin and the semi-circle structures are just like cells."

While paleontologists have analyzed dinosaur bones and teeth, Barbi said the piece of skin "adds an extra layer of information, so it's a new component in the study of evolution."