Bizarre ‘dragon scales’ spotted on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover spotted a series of unusual polygon shapes this month that resemble large fossilized reptile scales.

While scientists say they have not seen such rock formations in such numbers, social media users are excited about their similarity to scales of the mythical beasts.

Comments have included: ‘Here lies dragons!’, ‘Almost looks like scales’ and ‘Dragonscale! Here there be dragons!’

Curiosity captured images of the shapes as it was driving towards a relatively young, 33ft-wide crater the space agency has named Antofagasta.

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 try to work out the explanation for the polygon shapes, which could have been created 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," Fraeman said.