8/17/2023 0 Comments Dinosaur t rex bones![]() In the U.S., fossils found on federal land must enter approved repositories, such as accredited museums. Phipps recalls some paleontologists took issue with the way he had excavated it and cataloged the dig site. Phipps and the Murrays tried to convince a museum to buy it, but they couldn’t find any takers. Months of off-and-on digging eventually revealed that the chocolate-brown fossil consisted of a largely complete Triceratops-as well as a neighboring tyrannosaur.Īfter Phipps’s crew protected the fossil with burlap and plaster and hauled it from the Murrays’ ranch, the fossil spent years in storage at a private lab in Fort Peck, Montana. Phipps and his team were surveying a Montana ranch owned by Lige and Mary Ann Murray when Phipps’s cousin Chad O’Connor found a trail of bone bits that led to a Triceratops pelvis eroding out of the hillside. The story of the Dueling Dinosaurs’ discovery and long journey to the NCMNS is every bit as dramatic as the fossil itself.Īs the sun bore down on Garfield County, Montana, in the summer of 2006, a fossil hunter named Clayton Phipps made the find of his life. “It’s going to be a very iconic specimen,” adds paleontologist Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “There will literally be thousands of studies done on these fossils,” says paleontologist Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Paleontologists are welcoming the news that the Dueling Dinosaurs fossil has found a permanent home. “The Dueling Dinosaurs are really a gem that’s been hidden away for more than a decade,” says Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and the NCMNS head of paleontology. The fossil will be housed in a new expansion to the museum, including a state-of-the-art paleontology lab, that will open in 2022. Thanks to donors including private foundations and the city, county, and state governments, the nonprofit Friends of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is buying the Dueling Dinosaurs on the museum’s behalf for an undisclosed sum. After years of legal battles that left the fossil locked away in labs or warehouses, the famed find is headed to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) in Raleigh. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īut that’s about to change.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |