- A dinosaur bone dating back 67.5 million years was discovered beneath a Denver museum's parking lot.
- The bone, found 763 feet below ground, is the deepest and oldest fossil found in Denver.
- Other discoveries in urban settings around the world have provided valuable insights about dinosaurs.
In a serendipitous occurrence, a dinosaur museum in Denver found a fossil underneath its own parking lot.
According to news reports, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, a dinosaur fossils hub, was recently drilling down hundreds of feet to explore for geothermal energy.
Upon inspecting the drilling bore, scientists discovered the unexpected rare find — a dinosaur bone dating back to 67.5 million years ago.
What were the chances?
The odds of finding a dinosaur fossil in a narrow drill core are very slim, experts say, which is why this discovery sparked great enthusiasm in the museum.
“It’s basically like winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning on the same day,” James Hagadorn, curator of geology at the Museum, said per the museum’s online magazine.
Found more than 763 feet below the museum’s parking lot, the bone is “the deepest and oldest fossil ever discovered within Denver city limits,” according to an official press release.
Scientists identified the bone as part of vertebra from a plant-eating dinosaur, similar to a thescelosaurus or edmontosaurus.
These herbivores roamed the swampy lowlands that modern Denver used to be during the late Cretaceous period.
Sediment carried by rivers and floods would then bury the carcasses of these dinosaurs, eventually fossilizing in layers of rock, which now make up part of the Denver Basin.
Other dinosaurs fossils in urban settings
Despite the novelty of this discovery, Colorado has previously unearthed fossils in unlikely places.
The Colorado Rockies mascot, Dinger, was born from the discovery of a rib bone and other fragments underneath Coors Field.
In addition, Hagadorn told ABC News “tons of cool fossils” have been found underneath Denver International Airport.
But Colorado is not the only land mine with “Jurassic”-esque fossils.
Dinosaur pebbles for a garden
In 2021, a geology professor and his wife collected rocks for their garden from a construction site Campus at the University of Massachusetts during their stroll.
After asking the workers, Mark McMenamin and his wife Diana, picked up about 15 to 20 rocks.
According to a Newsweek article, MacMenamin noticed one of the rocks had a different texture. It was a fossil.
McMenanim carried out testing and discovered their intended ornamental rock to be an elbow bone for a predatory dinosaur known as Theropoda.
These carnivores were around 30 feet long, had hollow limb bones, bladelike teeth and lived over 140 million years ago in the Early Jurassic period.
The dinosaur was in the garden
In 2017, a home owner in Portugal stumbled upon a dinosaur fossil in his backyard amid home renovations.
According to CNN, the owner contacted a paleontologist research team after noticing several fossilized bone fragments.
Upon digging, the paleontologist unearthed a pristine huge rib cage, measuring nearly 10 feet in length.
The remains belonged to a sauropod, one of the biggest dinosaurs, and largest animals to have ever lived.
Sauropods had long necks and tails, ate plants, walked on four legs and lived sometime between the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous periods around 160 to 100 million years ago.