Have you ever searched for a pair of glasses, only to realize that they were on your head the whole time?
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is filled with exhibits of dinosaur skeletons. And in the scientific equivalent of tossing couch cushions, its scientists discovered a dinosaur fossil deep — really deep — below the surface of one of its own parking lots, the museum announced this month.
The fossil was buried 763 feet below the surface and unearthed because of a drilling project that aimed to better understand the geology of the Denver Basin. Two drilling rigs bore test holes under one of the museum’s paved parking lots.
On Jan. 30, one of the museum’s geologists, who was sifting through what had been extracted, immediately recognized the dinosaur bone, sending museum staff members into a frenzy. James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology, stepped out of a parent-teacher conference as his phone lit up with texts.
“There are never fossil emergencies,” Hagadorn said in an interview. “But that was a fossil emergency.”
The fossil extracted is cylindrical and inches long, and quite likely part of a bigger bone. To date it, scientists used the moment in time when dinosaurs went extinct as a result of an asteroid as a measuring stick. That event left a mark — a narrow horizon marked by a layer of clay — that is visible all over Colorado. To arrive at an age of 70 million years, scientists used the map of the horizon and measured the depth of notable fossil discoveries in the area and compared them to the one in January.
The fossil is too small to be linked to a specific dinosaur, though museum experts hypothesize that it belonged to an ornithopod, a small herbivore. — SOPAN DEB / NYT
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