AFP – What did you do for summer vacation? Three pre-teen dinosaur aficionados have the answer of a lifetime: they discovered the remains of a rare juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex in the North Dakota dirt.
Scientists and filmmakers announced on Tuesday that brothers Liam and Jessin Fisher, age seven and 10 at the time of the find, and their nine-year-old cousin Kaiden Madsen, were walking in the Hell Creek formation of the Badlands in July 2022 when they found a large fossilised leg bone.
“Dad asked ‘What is this?’ and Jessin said, ‘That’s a dinosaur!’” exclaimed young Liam on a video call with his brother, cousin, father Sam Fisher, dinosaur experts and reporters.
They snapped a pic and sent it to a family friend, vertebrate palaeontologist Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, according to a statement.
When Lyson eventually arrived at the site, he brushed off a tooth and quickly realised the enormity of what the fossil hunters uncovered: an “extremely rare” juvenile T-Rex specimen that lived 67 million years ago – and could offer critical clues about how the king of dinosaurs grew up.
“It still gives me goosebumps,” Lyson recalled on the call.
