KarunaNews Story

A Denver museum known for its dinosaur displays has made a fossil bone discovery closer to home than anyone ever expected: under its own parking lot. It came from a hole drilled more than 750 ft (230 meters) deep to study geothermal heating potential for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The museum is popular with dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Full-size dinosaur skeletons amaze children barely knee-high to a parent. This latest find is not so visually impressive. Even so, the odds of finding the hockey-puck-shaped fossil sample were impressively small. With a bore only a couple of inches (5cm) wide, museum officials struggled to describe just how unlikely it was to hit a dinosaur. “Finding a dinosaur bone in a core is like hitting a hole in one from the moon. It’s like winning the Willy Wonka factory. It’s incredible, it’s super rare,” said James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology. A vertebra of a smallish, plant-eating dinosaur is believed to be the source. The fossil’s shape suggests it was a duck-billed dinosaur or thescelosaurus, a smaller but somewhat similar species.