A 5-year-old Texas boy and his father got to help excavate a 100-million-year-old dinosaur fossil this week, about seven months after the child first discovered it by accident at a construction site.
Last September, Dallas Zoo worker Tim Brys and his son Wylie were digging for marine life fossils in an area of exposed dirt behind the shopping center in Mansfield when his then 4-year-old son stumbled across something, The Dallas Morning News reported.
"He walked up ahead of me and found a piece of bone," Brys said Tuesday at the dig site, which was underwater during the Jurassic period. "It was a pretty good size and I knew I had something interesting."
At the time the zookeeper and his son had no idea what creature the bone belonged to. After months of applying for permits to dig up the fossils, Wylie and his father finally learned from Southern Methodist University paleontologists what they found.
"My dad told me it was a turtle," Wylie told the Morning News. "But now he's telling me it's a dinosaur."
A 100 million-year-old dinosaur to be exact. SMU scientists believe the bone belonged to a pony-sized dinosaur named nodosaur that lived on land.
"Quite rare to find a dinosaur in this area," SMU professor and paleontologist Michael Polcyn told the newspaper.
The fossils were sent to SMU where they will be cleaned and studied. Researchers said they will keep an eye on the dig site, which is still under construction. But they doubt any more dinosaurs will be found.
Since the discovery, Brys says his son, who loves playing outside, still finds fossils just as fascinating.
"He's a little kid," Tim Brys told The Washington Post. "He likes playing in the dirt as much as finding fossils, I think."
