A mummified dinosaur has been unearthed by fossil hunters in the United States that has soft tissue and skin cells intact.

The discovery is being hailed by experts as important to the study of the Earth's pre-historic past, with skin, tendons and muscles preserved on the 67 million-year-old skeleton.

Unearthed in North Dakota, the fossilised dinosaur was a duck-billed plant eating hadrosaur and is remarkably well preserved.

The 3,600kg body of the dinosaur has been examined using a giant CT scanner provided by the Boeing Company, which is often used for parts for NASA, revealing a number of key facts about the hadrosaur that were previously unknown, including that it had very large hindquarters build for speed.

Nicknamed Dakota, experts have also suggested that the hadrosaur may have had striped scales to enable it to blend in with surrounding foliage for camouflage.