Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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The Denver Museum of Nature & Science discovered a dinosaur fossil buried in its own parking lot.
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The partial bone of a plant-eating dinosaur is the oldest and deepest dinosaur fossil ever found in Denver.
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The museum is a well-known dinosaur buff destination, and has multiple full-size dinosaur skeletons on display.
When a museum popular with dinosaur enthusiasts went digging in its own parking lot, the dinosaur fossil their team found didn’t have far to travel to make it into an exhibit. The Denver Museum of Nature & Science located a roughly 67.5-million-year-old partial dinosaur bone 763 feet below its own parking lot—the oldest and deepest ever found in Denver.
“This partial vertebra from a plant-eating dinosaur offers an extraordinary glimpse into prehistoric Denver and the animals that inhabited this area,” the museum wrote in a statement.
Museum staff weren’t looking for dinosaur bones to add to an exhibit when they started digging. Instead, crews were conducting geothermal test drilling to assess the viability of switching from natural gas to geothermal energy. While the equipment was out, they added some scientific coring to their process in the hopes of “better understand[ing] the geology of the Denver Basin.” That led to the unexpected fossil.
The coring hole, just two inches wide, was only supposed to help experts study the soil. There was no expectation of locating something as wild as a dinosaur fossil. “Finding a dinosaur bone in a core is like hitting a hole in one from the Moon,” James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology, told the Associated Press. “It’s like winning the Willy Wonka factory. It’s incredible, it’s super rare.”
The museum said that only two other similar coring samples in the entire world have produced fossils. Neither of those, however, were at the site of a dinosaur museum.
The discovery has been dated to the late Cretaceous period, roughly 1.5 million years before the extinction of dinosaurs, and the bone was found alongside fossilized vegetation. “This animal was living in what was probably a swampy environment that would have been heavily vegetated at the time,” Patrick O’Connor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, told the AP.
The dinosaur experts believe—as Erin LaCount, director of education programs at the Dinosaur Ridge track site near Denver, told the AP—that the fossil was from a small dinosaur, possibly a duck-billed dinosaur, a thescelosaurus, or another similar-sized dinosaur. Still, there’s not enough evidence to distinguish with certainty what type of dinosaur was located.
Not everyone was as excited about the find as the folks in Denver. When the AP contacted Thomas Williamson, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque, he agreed it was an unexpected discovery, but said it was one without much value because there’s no real way to determine what species of dinosaur was found. “It’s a surprise, I guess,” he said. “Scientifically, it’s not that exciting.”
Folks in Denver, though, may oppose that view. With the fossil now on display in the museum’s Discovering Teen Rex exhibit, Hagadorn said he’d love to excavate the entire parking lot to find the rest of the dinosaur. “But I don’t think that’s going to fly,” he said, “because we really need parking.”
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