Museum's Dino Bone Find 'Like Hitting a Hole in One From the Moon'

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 feet deep to study geothermal heating potential for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The find is not as visually impressive as the full-size dinosaur skeletons that delight visitors of all ages. Even so, the odds of finding the hockey-puck-shaped fossil sample were impressively small, the AP reports.

• With a bore only a couple of inches wide, museum officials struggled to describe just how unlikely it was to hit a dinosaur, even in a region with a fair number of such fossils. "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," says James Hagadorn, the museum's curator of geology.

• Only two similar finds have been noted in bore hole samples anywhere in the world, not to mention on the grounds of a dinosaur museum, according to museum officials.
• A vertebra of a smallish, plant-eating dinosaur is believed to be the source. It lived in the late Cretaceous period around 67.5 million years ago, around 1.5 million years before an asteroid impact brought the long era of dinosaurs to an end. Fossilized vegetation also was found in the bore hole near the bone.
• "This animal was living in what was probably a swampy environment that would have been heavily vegetated at the time," said Patrick O'Connor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum.
• The fossil's shape suggests it was a duck-billed dinosaur or thescelosaurus, a smaller but somewhat similar species, according to Erin LaCount, director of education programs at the Dinosaur Ridge track site just west of Denver. The find is "absolutely legit and VERY COOL!" LaCount tells the AP.
• The bore-hole fossil is now on display at the museum but there are no plans to look for more under the parking lot. "I would love to dig a 763-foot hole in the parking lot to excavate that dinosaur, the rest of it," Hagadorn says. "But I don't think that's going to fly because we really need parking."