by Denver (AP) – A museum in Denver’s museum known for its dinosaur displays has a fossil bone closer to home than ever expected, when it had ever expected, under his own parking lot.
It came from a hole that was drilled more than 230 meters deep to examine the geothermal heating potential for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
The museum is popular with dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Full size dinosaur skeletons hardly surprise children to a parent, let alone a tyrannosaurus.
This latest find is not so visually impressive. Nevertheless, the likelihood of finding the hockey-puck-shaped piece of stone was impressively small.
With a hole only a few centimeters, museum officers had difficulty describing how unlikely it was to hit a dinosaurs, even in a region with a reasonable number of such fossils.
“Finding a dinosaur bone in one core is like a hole in one of the moon. It is like winning the Willy Wonka factory. It is incredible, it is super rare,” said James Hagadorn, the curator of the museum’s geology.
In Bohrloch samples in the world, only two similar finds were found, not to mention the grounds of a dinosaur museum, said museum officials.
It is believed that a vertebrae of a small, herbivorous dinosaurs is the source. It lived around 67.5 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period. An asteroid effect brought the long era of dinosaurs around 66 million years ago, according to scientists.
A petrified vegetation was also found in the borehole near the bone.
“This animal lived in a likely swampy environment that would have been heavily vegetated at the time,” said Patrick O’Connor, curator for vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
The dinosaurs discoveries in the area include parts of Tyrannosaurus Rex and fossils of Triceratops. This is the deepest and oldest so far, said O’Connor.
Other experts on the field guarantee the legitimacy of the find, but with mixed reactions.
“It is a surprise, I think. Scientific it is not so exciting,” said Thomas Williamson, curator of paleontology in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque.
There was no way to say exactly what types of dinosaurs it was, Williamson noticed.
The find is “absolutely legitimate and very cool!” Erin Lacount, director of educational programs at the Dinosaur Ridge Track location west of Denver, said by e -mail.
The shape of the fossil indicates that it was a dinosaurs or a thescelosaurus from duck bars, a smaller but somewhat similar way, as LACOUNT found.
The Bohrlochfossil is now of course exhibited in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, but there are no plans to search under the parking lot.
“I would like to dig a 233-meter hole in the parking lot to do this dinosaurs to do the rest of it. But I don’t think that will fly because we really need parking spaces,” said Hagadorn.
