DENVER – Officials stumbled upon a 67-million-year-old dinosaur bone beneath the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) during a drilling project, the DMNS announced on Wednesday.
The discovery occurred in the spring of 2024 when the museum was conducting a geothermal feasibility project. As part of that project, officials drilled cores about 1,000 feet into the ground to learn about the geology beneath City Park and the larger Denver Basin, the DMNS said.
Part of the discovered fossil specimen.
(Rick Wicker / Denver Museum of Nature and Science / FOX Weather)
Inside one of those cores, scientists found a piece of vertebra from the backbone of a plant-eating dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Period. Officials likened it to the two-legged Thescelosaurus.
DINOSAUR FOSSIL REVEALED AFTER HEAVY RAINS IN BRAZIL
During that time, the land that is now Denver was a tropical and swampy ecosystem with tall palm trees and lush vegetation, according to museum officials.
Thescelosaurus, two-legged dinosaur measuring around 10-12 feet long. Their vertebrae are similar to the one found in the rock core deep below the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
(Andrey Atuchin, Denver Museum of Nature & Science / FOX Weather)
This environment was rife for herbivorous dinosaurs, such as the species the partial vertebra came from, as they foraged amid the brush and even coexisted with the Tyrannosaurus rex.
“The partial dinosaur bone found in a core sample beneath the Museum provides a direct glimpse into this buried world, preserved for millions of years beneath the city,” the DMNS said in a statement.
Analysis of the dinosaur bone was published in Rocky Mountain Geology in June.
