A team of paleontologists in North Dakota’s state museum is carefully chiseling away at a 65 million-year-old chunk of rock in order to extricate the nearly complete duckbilled dinosaur encased in it, according to the AP. “Dakota,” as the mummified Edmontosaurus has been named, is not your garden-variety, fragmented fossil; it’s a 30-foot-long specimen complete with skin and very nearly whole.

As one of the paleontologists, Phillip Manning, told the AP:

“This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh”This is not the usual disjointed sentence or fragment of a word that the fossil records offer up as evidence of past life. This is a full chapter.”

Dakota was discovered by Tyler Lyson, a doctoral paleontology student at Yale, back in 1999 when he was poking around on his uncle’s ranch in North Dakota’s Badlands, but he didn’t start trying to unearth the fossil till 2004, at which point he realized the significance of his find:

“Usually all we have is bones,” Lyson said in a telephone interview. “In this special case, we’re not just after the bones; we’re after the whole carcass.”

The painstaking process will take at least another year, but when Dakota’s exfoliation is complete, Lyson plans to send it on a worldwide tour. Usually, when you hear about dinosaurs going on tour, you think of the Rolling Stones. Who’s got the better complexion, Dakota, or Keith Richards? Stay tuned: researchers are toiling away with tiny brushes and chisels, putting in seventeen-hour days, seven days a week, to ready Dakota for the road.

Learn more about fossils at the Virtual Fossil Museum.