For the staff at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, examining this newly found vertebrae from a 67-million-year old plant-eating dinosaur was just another day in the office.
The surprise came in the form of its discovery—from right under the museum itself, which seems appropriate.
Months ago, the Denver Museum undertook an exploratory drilling project on-site to determine if it were possible to change some of the building’s utilities over to geothermal energy from fossil fuels.
A drill core sample, explains Dr. James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology, is basically like a doctor using a syringe to draw blood from a patient. The drill extracts a long cylinder of rock and sediment straight down some 800 feet.
At just a few inches in diameter, the circular drill happened to pass perfectly over the fossil, drawing it up with the rest of the dirt, a mind-boggling coincidence the chances of which Hagadorn described as “infinitesimally small.”
As a result, it’s not only the deepest fossil ever found in Denver, but also happens to be the oldest. Dating back to the late Cretaceous Period, it likely belonged to something like a Thesculosaurus or Edmontasaurus, two species that roamed Great Plaints at that time.
“We knew those dinosaurs were (nearby in other parts of) Colorado or Wyoming, but we didn’t know that they were in Denver, too … but we suspected it right at this time period,” Hagadorn told AP.
COOL DINO DISCOVERIES:
“Now, we have another plant eater that’s been cruising around Denver munching on, who knows, gingers and palm leaves and other ferns and plants 67 million years ago.”
Hagadorn said he’d love to drill a hole down 787 feet and excavate the rest of the dinosaur, but, being that it was found beneath the museum parking lot, he doesn’t believe that’s going to happen anytime soon.
“We need parking!”
WATCH the story below from AP…
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