The fishing contest already wasn’t going well when Andy Moore snagged his line on a big rock. But what seemed like yet another annoyance became an interesting discovery when Moore discovered what looked like a fish or deer skeleton embedded into the boulder.
“I get up to it, and I’m like, ‘Oh wow! That’s kind of cool.’ ... Something told me to take a picture of this,” Moore told WOWT, a television news station in Omaha, Nebraska.
He did take some pictures, but then he returned his focus to fishing. Later, he posted the images online.
“Within minutes, texts and phone calls started flooding in,” WOWT reported.
Moore’s friends thought the skeleton might be an ancient fossil, so he reached out to the Army Corps of Engineers. Moore brought a geologist to the site, who confirmed that the skeleton was something special.
“The biologist confirmed with 6 News that the fossil does appear to be that of a prehistoric predator fish that’s up to 90 million years old,” WOWT reported.
Although Moore didn’t win anything in the fishing contest that brought him to that stretch of the Missouri River near Yankton, South Dakota, he said he has no regrets about the day.
“The whole cool thing about the whole story is an actual fishermen caught a prehistoric fish,” he told KETV Omaha.
The fossil is going to be dried out and then put on display at the Lewis and Clark Visitor Center in Omaha, the article noted.