Three North Dakota schoolboys made a larger-than-life discovery when they stumbled across a T rex skeleton during a hike.
Two young brothers and their cousin were wandering through a fossil-rich stretch of the North Dakota Badlands in 2022 when they made the stunning discovery, which left them “completely speechless,” they said.
According to experts, the rare skeleton is that of an adolescent Tyrannosaurus rex, which the boys have dubbed a “teenrex.”
The partial skeleton, one of only a handful of juvenile T rex specimens ever discovered, will be displayed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science later this month.
The brothers, Liam and Jessin Fisher, then seven and ten, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen, who was nine, and their father Sam, first discovered a large leg bone which they sent a picture of to Dr Tyler Lyson, a family friend who is the associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Lyson then organized an excavation that began 11 months later, suspecting it was a relatively common duckbill dinosaur. But it didn’t take long to determine they had found something more special. Lyson recalled that he started digging with Jessin where he thought he might find a neck bone.
“Instead of finding a cervical vertebrae, we found the lower jaw with several teeth sticking out of it,” Lyson said. “And it doesn’t get any more diagnostic than that, seeing these giant tyrannosaurus teeth staring back at you.”
Based on the size of the tibia, experts estimate the dinosaur was 13 to 15 years old when it died and likely weighed around 3,500 pounds — about two-thirds of the size of a fully-grown adult T rex.
A Black Hawk helicopter airlifted the plaster-clad mass to a waiting truck to drive it to the Denver museum.
A documentary crew with Giant Screen Films was there to capture the discovery.
“It was electric. You got goosebumps,” recalled Dave Clark, who was part of the crew filming the documentary that later was narrated by Jurassic Park actor Sir Sam Neill.
At a press conference on Sunday, Liam said that his friends at school had not believed him when he had first described the find.
All three boys added that the T rex was their favorite dinosaur.
Meanwhile, Jessin, a fan of the Jurassic Park movies and an aspiring paleontologist, also shared that he has continued looking for fossils, finding a turtle shell just a couple of days ago.
For other kids, he had this advice: “Just put down their electronics and go out hiking.”
