DENVER — Museums are full of treasures untold, even in the most unlikely of places, like a parking lot.
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science was conducting some work to study the potential of geothermal heating for the facility, and when a crew drilled more than 750 feet deep, they hit something they didn’t know was there -- a fossilized dinosaur bone.
The fossil is small, about the size of a hockey puck, The Associated Press reported.
Finding it was like the proverbial needle in a haystack, or even worse.
The borehole they were drilling was only a couple of inches wide, but they unintentionally hit pay dirt.
“Finding a dinosaur bone in a core is like hitting a hole in one from the moon. It’s like winning the Willy Wonka factory. It’s incredible, it’s super rare,” geology curator James Hagadorn said.
Since they were digging so deep, planning to go down about 1,000 feet, the scientists had planned on bringing up rock samples to study, The Washington Post said.
But one of the “rocks” looked different. It was a different color, texture and not as strong as the other samples, according to the newspaper.
“Bob (Raynolds) called me and said, ‘I think we found a dinosaur,’” Hagadorn said.
Similar finds have only happened twice in the world, and this one was even rarer because it happened on a dinosaur museum property, the AP explained.
It is a vertebra of a small, plant-eater that lived in the late Cretaceous period, or about 67.5 million years ago, or about a million and a half years before an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs.
The sample is the oldest and deepest dinosaur found in Denver city limits, the Post reported.
“This animal was living in what was probably a swampy environment that would have been heavily vegetated at the time," Patrick O’Connor, the museum’s vertebrate paleontology curator, said.
The fossil is now on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the AP reported.
But don’t expect it to be reunited with other fossils from the site.
“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.
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