Denver museum finds dinosaur bone under its parking lot
'This may be the most unusual dinosaur discovery I have ever been a part of,' DMNS director of Earth and Space Sciences Patrick O'Connor said in a statement.
The find happened in January, when the museum began a drilling project to assess the possibility of switchingfrom natural gas to geothermal energy. The test also offered an opportunity for researchers to simultaneously oversee a scientific coring initiative to better understand the Denver Basin's geology. To do so, a pair of drill rigs each bored a one-foot-wide hole into the ground that the team then used to extract samples. But about 763 feet below the blacktop, geologists found more than just sediment deposited by the South Platte River—they discovered a pair of bone fragments.
'It's basically like winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning on the same day,' DMNS curator of geology James Hagadorn said in an interview. 'No one could have predicted that this little square foot of land where we started drilling would actually contain a dinosaur bone beneath it.'
The larger of the two fossils unfortunately didn't survive its encounter with diggers' drill bit. But before fragmenting, the bone measured about 1.9 inches long, 2.3 inches wide, and 2.3 inches tall. A subsequent analysis published in the journal Rocky Mountain Geology indicated the vertebra belonged to an herbivore similar to a Thescelosaurus or Edmontosaurus.
At 67.5 million years old, it is the oldest and deepest dinosaur fossil ever discovered in Denver, offering a window into the region right before the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction event. As the DMNS explains in its accompanying profile, Denver looked vastly different during the Cretaceous than it does today. Instead of snowy mountains, tropical rainforests and swampy lowland floodplains covered Colorado with dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus rex roaming around.
'In my 35 years at the museum, we've never had an opportunity quite like this—to study the deep geologic layers beneath our feet with such precision,' DMNS Earth Sciences research associate Bob Raynolds said. 'That this fossil turned up here… is nothing short of magical.'
It remains to be seen if the museum will eventually make the shift to geothermal energy. In the meantime, visitors can see the unexpected discovery on display as part of a temporary exhibit.
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