A 7-year-old girl recently discovered an ancient sea monster in Australia.
Amber Wilson, 7, was digging at a free fossil hunting site at Kronosaurus Korner museum with her twin brother and parents as one of their vacation activities.
While Amber was digging with her family she found a a large hockey puck-shaped vertebra hidden in a pile of rocks. This vertebra was from an undiscovered dolphin-like dinosaur sea monster called ichthyosaur platypterygius australis, News.com.au reported.
"We had one very, very excited little girl," Amber's father, Tony Wilson, said to News.com.au.
The finding was the best and most complete ichthyosaur skulls in all of Australia, Kronosaurus Korner's interpretation manager and curator, Timothy Holland, tells News.com.au.
"We had one very, very excited little girl," Mr. Wilson said. "We were just going there to find a fish scale or a tooth. That was about as big as we thought we would get - it was just fantastic. The kids think that's normal - you go and dig in a pit and find a dinosaur. Money couldn't buy the incredible experience our family got from finding this fossil."
Amber wasn't the only one excited by the discovery.
"I was completely stunned," Holland said to News.com.au. "A professional palaeontologist might search their entire career to find a fossil of this quality. It only took the Wilson family a few hours."
The 882-pound specimen discovered by the Wilson family was carried by nine people into Kronosaurus Korner and put on display.
