A dinosaur fossil has been found in an unlikely place, a hole drilled under the parking lot of a Colorado museum where dinosaur skeletons are on display.

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 (230 meters) deep to study geothermal heating potential for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The museum is popular with dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Full-size dinosaur skeletons amaze kiddos barely knee-high to a parent, much less to a Tyrannosaurus.

This latest find is not so visually impressive. Even so, the odds of finding the hockey-puck-shaped fossil sample were impressively small.

With a bore only a couple of inches (5 centimeters) 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.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
    4·
    24 days ago

    “I would love to dig a 763-foot (233-meter) hole in the parking lot to excavate that dinosaur, the rest of it. But I don’t think that’s going to fly because we really need parking,” Hagadorn said.