The Denver Museum of Nature & Science didn’t have to go very far to find one of the latest additions to its fossil collection.
Crews were drilling test holes deep into the museum’s parking lot this January for a potential geothermal energy project, reaching nearly 800 feet beneath the pavement, when they pulled up a partial bone fossil from the late Cretaceous.
“This may be the most unusual dinosaur discovery I have ever been a part of,” said Patrick O’Connor, director of Earth & Space Sciences at the Museum, in a press release.
It’s "exceptionally rare” to find a fossil in a drilling project, he said, and it’s the deepest and oldest dinosaur fossil ever found in Denver city limits.
Scientists were cleaning a core sample when they found the partial fossil, embedded in what appeared to be the remnants of ancient mud — right next to, “some coal from the plants that that critter might have munched on … how cool is that?”
“We've been logging this core, documenting what environments were represented here nearly 67 million years ago,” said James Hagadorn, geology curator for the museum, in a video published by DMNS.
The fossil appears to be part of a vertebra from a plant-eating dinosaur. Museum staff say the dinosaur was likely similar to a Thescelosaurus or Edmontosaurus, both of which lived in the area before the asteroid incident.
Thescelosaurus stood on two legs and was roughly 10 to 12 feet long, according to the museum.
The cores were drilled to a depth of nearly 1,000 feet in total. The museum is exploring the possibility that it could use heat from deep within the earth to replace its natural gas systems for heating and cooling the facility.
The drilling project is funded by a $250,000 grant from the Colorado Energy Office.
