DENVER — Three kids in North Dakota made a discovery of a lifetime that will be on display later this month, two years after it was uncovered.
Kaiden Masden and his cousins Liam and Jessin Fisher were only 9, 7 and 10 respectively when they were hiking through land owned by the Bureau of Land Management near Marmath, North Dakota in 2022, The Associated Press reported.
“You just never know what you are going to find out there. You see all kinds of cool rocks and plants and wildlife,” the Fisher brothers’ father Sam said.
Liam said he and his father first saw a bone sticking out of a rock. he called it a “chunk-osaurus” a made-up name for parts of fossils that are too small to identify.
Sam Fisher took a photo and shared it with friend Tyeler Lyson who happens to be the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s associate curator of vertebrate paleontology.
Lyson thought, at first, it was a common duckbill dinosaur but still got a team together and started digging last summer. The three boys and sister Emalynn Fisher, joined them in the field to dig.
Lyson started digging in an area with Jessin and instead of finding a neck bone as they expected, they found something much more.
“We found the lower jaw with several teeth sticking out of it,” Lyson said. “And it doesn’t get any more diagnostic than that, seeing these giant tyrannosaurus teeth staring back at you.”
The dig site, including the fossils was encased in plaster and airlifted by a Black Hawk helicopter to a truck that drove it to the museum. The entire thing weighed 6,000 pounds the museum said.
The artifact will be on display later this month where visitors will see crews break away the rock, unveiling what is inside. It will take about a year.
Lyson knows there was a leg, hip, pelvis, tailbones and parts of the skull found, but they’re not sure what else is hidden in the rock, the AP reported.
From what has already been examined, Lyson said the dinosaur was between 13 and 15 years old when it died and weighed about 3,500 pounds or 2/3 of the size of an adult, the AP reported.
The museum said it was one of only four adolescent T. rex’s found ever.
The exhibit called “Discovering Teen Rex” will open on June 21.
The dig was being filmed by a documentary crew and a film, “T.REX” narrated by “Jurassic Park” actor Sam Neill which chronicles the find, is debuting on June 21