It’s not every day you find a fossilised dinosaur. Even experts who deliberately set out to find on know that it is a lucky day when they come across a bone sticking out from the earth. So it is quite remarkable that someone who was just wandering around behind a supermarket in Dallas, Texas should come across the bones of one. And even more remarkable that the finder was a five-year-old boy.
Wylie Brys initially dug up a fragment that his father, Tim Brys, thought might be a turtle shell. Brys, who works in Dallas Zoo, was aware that the area was flooded in prehistoric times. So they kept digging to see if there were more remains. Wylie then found a much larger bone and at that stage they decided to call in the experts.
The find happened in September 2014 and even with the help of Dallas Zoo it took seven months to get the necessary permits for a full dig to take place. The bones have now been retrieved and taken to Southern Methodist Union for cleaning up and further study. Dale Winkler, a professor of palaeontology at SMU, believes the bones are that of a nodosaur. It is a heavily armoured herbivore from about 100 million years ago. He described the pony-sized nodosaur as “armored beach balls that floated out to sea.”
Edmontonia – a Nodosaur
Michael Polcyn, Winkler’s colleague at SMU, says that it is rare to find dinosaurs in the area as at that time the area was under a shallow sea. However, they would keep digging for a week or so in the area in case there was anything else there. The site would then be handed over to a construction crew who are putting up new buildings on the site. If it wasn’t for Wylie’s lucky find, this fossil dinosaur would probably never have seen the light of day.