Hiker stumbles on dinosaur fossil in Colorado. Excavators find one more
Two large prehistoric fossils were unearthed after a hiker stumbled on one of them, a Colorado museum said.
The hiker found the fossil in the Royal Gorge region, an area “famous for the discovery of a wide variety of prehistoric fossil remains,” late last year and “did the right thing” by contacting the Bureau of Land Management Royal Gorge Field Office, according to a Jan. 12 email to McClatchy News from Lisa Studts, Royal Gorge Regional Museum’s director, and a news release from the museum.
“The specific layer that these were found in can tell you a lot about how it was deposited, where and why, just based on the rock that it’s encased in alone,” paleontologist Joshua Broussard told Canon City Daily Record. “That’s a really big clue for an expert like me, and that’s why it’s important that people leave them where they are.”
Experts from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science began to excavate the fossil and in doing so found another almost “right beside it,” Studts wrote.
The fossils, estimated to be 145 to 150 million years old, are from the Jurassic Period, according to Studts.
The two fossils, a tibia and fibula from a “longneck sauropod dinosaur,” were brought to the museum, according to the museum.
“The fact that they are intact and exactly how the leg was arranged when alive is really, really rare and important,” Broussard told Canon City Daily Record.
Sauropods are “marked by large size, a long neck and tail, a four-legged stance, and a herbivorous diet,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“These reptiles were the largest of all dinosaurs and the largest land animals that ever lived,” Encyclopaedia Britannica said.
The dinosaur species was “highly diverse in the late Jurassic Epoch (about 164 million to 145 million years ago) and persisted into the Cretaceous Period (145 million to 66 million years ago),” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Now, the museum plans to give the public an “up-close look at how dinosaur fossils are prepared and preserved,” the release said.
The museum said there will be a fossil reveal on Saturday, Jan. 21. Additionally, people can watch volunteers working with the fossils every Friday and Saturday for a few weeks starting Jan. 21.
The museum is in Cañon City, about 45 miles southwest of Colorado Springs.
This story was originally published January 13, 2023 at 1:30 PM with the headline "Hiker stumbles on dinosaur fossil in Colorado. Excavators find one more."
