NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured images of remarkable polygon-shaped rock formations on Mars, likened to ‘dragon scales’ by excited social media users
Unusual ‘dragon scales’ have been spotted on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The robot discovered a series of peculiar polygon shapes that bear a striking resemblance to large fossilised reptile scales.
While scientists admit they’ve never seen such rock formations in such quantities before, social media users are thrilled by their likeness to the scales of mythical creatures. Comments have included: ‘Here lies dragons!‘, ‘Almost looks like scales’ and ‘Dragonscale! Here there be dragons!’
The images of these intriguing shapes were captured by Curiosity as it journeyed towards a relatively young, 33ft-wide crater named Antofagasta by the space agency.
Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: “Many of the rocks we’ve driven over have these incredible textures – thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons crisscross their surface.
“We’ve seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn’t seem quite this dramatically abundant, stretching across the ground for meters and meters in our Mastcam mosaics.”
NASA will now attempt to determine the cause of these polygon shapes, which may have formed as the Martian surface dried out and cracked over millions of years.
“We continued to collect lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed,” Abigail Fraeman added.
In other dragon-related news a five-year-old lad has been left with a giant dragon-shaped SCAR – after suffering an allergic reaction to a holiday black henna tattoo.
Kirsty Campbell Russell flew out to Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt with her partner and five kids in December last year for a relaxing nine-day holiday.
During their trip the family decided to get henna designs drawn onto their arms on a day out at the local shopping centre. Kirsty opted for a traditional pattern on her hand and her youngest son Mason Abrams, five, had a dragon design drawn onto his right arm.