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A father, his two sons and their cousin were hiking in the Badlands of North Dakota in 2022 when they discovered what looked like a dinosaur foot sticking out of a rock.
Sam Fisher, his sons, Jessin and Liam, who were 10 and 7 at the time, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen, who was 9, had been amateur fossil hunters for years and they knew that the area – the Hell Creek Formation – was rich with them, after they found fruit. some of the most famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons in the world.
Little did they know, however, that they were making a significant scientific discovery.
“My dad really tried to get Jessin and Kaiden to come, and they came forward,” Liam said during a news conference Tuesday in Denver. “Dad asked, ‘What is this?’ And Jessin said, ‘That’s a dinosaur!’
They submitted for a picture with the bones, and Fisher sent the image to the paleontologist and curator of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science Dr. Tyler Lyson, who was his high school classmate.
Now, the museum has unveiled what it calls a “Teen Rex,” a rare juvenile T. rex skeleton, one of only a handful in existence. The public will be able to see it being removed from the rock at the exhibition opening on 21 June.
‘Wishful thinking’
When he first got the picture of the leg bone, Lyson thought he was looking at a duck-billed dinosaur.
“I didn’t know it was a T. rex, because I only had photos, and the knee joint looked like a duck,” he said. “Later, I started looking at the photos a little more closely. And the way the bone was breaking up into sheets indicated that it might have been a meat-eating dinosaur.”
He then texted his palaeontologist friends, checking to see if anyone thought it might be a T. rex. “They were like, ‘No, it looks like a duck.’ And I was like, okay, probably just a wishful thinking.”
However, Lyson excavated in July 2023, visiting the found family. “The kids were with us every step of the way, which was great,” he said. “We realized it was a T. rex on the first day. We had cameras rolling as it happened.”
Lyson was hoping to find a neck bone, which would help distinguish between a duck dinosaur or a T. rex, as they are different in the two species. Instead, he turned up something much better: “We got a lower sod with a bunch of teeth sticking out,” which he believes was incontrovertible proof that the fossil was a T. rex.
“I was completely speechless,” Jessin Fisher said of the moment he realized the fossil was a T. rex.
They then proceeded to remove the overlying rock and, over a period of 11 days, carefully unearthed the 66-million-year-old sandstone rock layer containing the fossil, which they collected in a 9-foot-long, 5-foot-wide layer . plaster jacket weighs more than 6,000 pounds.
It was too heavy for a regular helicopter to lift, so a more advanced Black Hawk was called in. Less than a year later, the piece is about to become a live museum exhibition, and visitors will be able to watch scientists clean the fossil. and separating the individual bones — a process that could take up to a year, Lyson said.
A 40-minute documentary titled “T-REX,” will also be shown at the exhibition; includes behind-the-scenes footage from the fossil excavation.
Youth Discovers T. Rex: A Fierce Debate
Based on early estimates, Lyson thinks the fossil is that of a young T. rex that died of unknown causes when it was 13 or 15 years old. It was about 25 feet long and weighed about 3,500 pounds. A full-grown T. rex averaged 40 feet in length and weighed at least 8,000 pounds, according to Lyson.
The skeleton is about 30% complete, but Lyson said the bones are in good condition.
“We know that we have an articulated leg with the hip bones, that we have a few tail vertebrae, and I think a good chunk of the skull. We hope there’s a lot more of the skeleton in the rock, but it’s strange that we don’t have any ribs, we don’t have the arms, we don’t have much of the vertebrae – it’s a good thing. it doesn’t matter where more of it came from,” he said, adding that he is making plans to go back to the Hell Creek Formation and dig more.
Juvenile dinosaur fossils are rare because they are smaller and therefore harder to find, and more likely to be consumed after death because of their softer bones, Lyson said. Once the researchers isolate a bone, they will be able to carefully analyze it and learn more about the fossil, possibly confirming whether it is a young T. rex or something else.
That distinction is currently a hot topic in paleontology, and a paper published this year argued that some of the few young T. rex skeletons found may belong to a separate species called Nanotyrannus.
“That’s a fiercely fought debate, Nanotyrannus versus Tyrannosaurus Rex,” Lyson said. “I still think ours is a juvenile, because it’s too big to be a Nanatyrannus. There are other things that suggest he is a juvenile, too, in terms of skeletal maturity. Undoubtedly, this specimen will contribute greatly to that debate. It will be another data point from which people can make their arguments, and that’s important.”
Once the bone examinations are complete, Lyson will work on a scientific study outlining the discovery, which he aims to publish within the next few years.
Nick Longrich, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and one of the authors of the Nanotyrannus paper, said it would be great to confirm the discovery of a juvenile T. rex. “Tyrannosaurus is not common and young dinosaurs are extremely rare, so young T. Rex are the rarest,” he said.
“For that reason I doubt it. So far, almost all ‘juvenile T. rex’ are adults of its smaller cousin, Nanotyrannus. Not knowing anything else about it, I used to guess that’s what they have,” Longrich added. “But if they end up with a good little T. Rex skeleton, that would be pretty significant, and it’s really cool to see—it’s kind of the holy grail of Hell Creek dinosaur fossils. But a good young T. rex skeleton has to turn up sooner or later. I will be interested to see the paper.”
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