Two young brothers and their cousin were walking through a fossil-rich area of the North Dakota badlands when they made a “completely speechless” discovery: a T. rex bone jutting out of the earth.
The trio made their discovery public Monday during a Zoom news conference as technicians at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science prepared to begin removing the dinosaur from its rock cast for a special display called Discovering Teen Rex. The exhibit’s inauguration on June 21 will coincide with the release of the film “T.REX,” which is based on the July 2022 discoveries.
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It all started when Kaiden Madsen, then nine, went on a trek with his cousins, Liam and Jessin Fisher, then seven and ten, through Bureau of Acreage Management-owned acreage in Marmarth, North Dakota. Hiking is a favorite pastime for the brothers’ father, Sam Fisher.
“You never know what you’re going to discover out there. “You see a variety of cool rocks, plants, and wildlife,” he remarked.
Liam Fisher told how he and his father, who accompanied the trio, discovered the juvenile carnivore’s bone. After dying some 67 million years ago, it was buried in the Hell Creek Formation, a popular paleontology playground that stretches over Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. The formation has some of the best-preserved T. rex fossils yet discovered. Among them are Sue, a popular attraction at Chicago’s Field Museum, and Wyrex, a celebrity at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science.
But no one was aware of this at the time. Liam assumed the bone protruding out of the rock was a “chunk-osaurus,”ย a made-up moniker for fossil bits too small to be identified.
Nonetheless, Sam Fisher took a photograph and shared it with a family friend, Tyler Lyson, the associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Lyson initially assumed it was a common duckbill dinosaur. However, he organized an excavation that began last summer, bringing the boys and a sister, Emalynn Fisher, now 14, into the crew.
It didn’t take long to realize they’d discovered something more exceptional. Lyson recalls starting to dig with Jessin in hopes of finding a neck bone.
“Instead of finding a cervical vertebrae, we found the lower jaw with several teeth sticking out of it,” Lyson explained. “And it doesn’t get any more diagnostic than that, seeing these giant Tyrannosaurus teeth staring back at you.”
A documentary crew from Giant Screen Films was present to chronicle the findings.
Dave Clark, a crew member filming the documentary, recalls, “It was electric. You got goosebumps.” Sir Sam Neill, star of Jurassic Park, later narrated the documentary.
Liam said his friends were skeptical. “They did not believe me at all,” he explained.
He, Jessin, and Kaiden, whom the brothers perceive to be another sibling, fondly named the fossil “The Brothers.”
Based on the size of the tibia, experts believe the dinosaur was 13 to 15 years old when it died and weighed around 3,500 pounds (1,587.57 kilograms), or roughly two-thirds the size of a full-grown adult.
Finally, a Black Hawk aircraft flew the plaster-clad bulk to a waiting truck, which transported it to the Denver museum.
Lyson stated that more than 100 individual T. rex fossils had been discovered; however, many are fragmented. It is still uncertain how complete this fossil is. According to Lyson, they have discovered a leg, a hip, a pelvis, a couple of tailbones, and a significant portion of the skull.
The public will be able to witness crews chip away at the granite, which the museum thinks will take approximately a year.
“We wanted to share the preparation of this fossil with the public because it is a remarkable feeling,” Lyson stated.
Jessin, a Jurassic Park lover and wannabe paleontologist, has maintained his search for fossils, most recently discovering a turtle shell.
He advised other students to “just put down their electronics and go out hiking.”
