DENVER – Two young brothers and their cousin were walking through a fossil-rich section of North Dakota when they made a discovery that left them “completely speechless”: a T. rex bone sticking out of the ground.
The trio made their discovery public on Monday at a Zoom press conference as staff at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science prepare to begin chipping the fossil from its cast for a special exhibit called Discovering Teen Rex. The opening of the exhibition on June 21 will coincide with the July 2022 debut of the film “T.REX” about the find.
It all started when Kaiden Madsen, then 9, joined his cousins, Liam and Jessin Fisher, then 7 and 10, on a hike on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management around Marmarth, North Dakota. Hiking is a favorite pastime of the brothers’ father, Sam Fisher.
“You never know what you’re going to find there. You see all kinds of cool rocks, plants and wildlife,” he said.
Liam Fisher recalled that he and his father, who was accompanying the trio, first saw the young carnivore’s bone. After his death about 67 million years ago, he was buried in the Hell Creek Formation, a popular paleontological playground that stretches across Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. The formation has yielded some of the best-preserved T. rex fossils ever. Among them are Sue, a popular attraction at the Field Museum in Chicago, and Wyrex, the star of the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences.
But none of them knew that then. Liam said he thought the bone sticking out of the rock was what he described as a “chunk-osaurus” – a fancy name for fossil fragments too small to be identified.
Still, Sam Fisher took the picture and shared it with family friend Tyler Lyson, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
At first, Lyson suspected it was a fairly common duck-billed dinosaur. But he organized the dig, which began last summer, adding the boy and sister Emalynn Fisher, now 14, to the team.
It wasn’t long before they realized they had found something special. Lyson remembered that he started digging with Jessin, where he thought he might find the neck bone.
“Instead of finding cervical vertebrae, we found a lower jaw with several teeth sticking out,” Lyson said. “And it’s no more diagnostic than seeing those giant tyrannosaur teeth looking at you.
A documentary crew with Giant Screen Films was there to capture the discovery.
“It was electric. It gave you goosebumps,” recalled Dave Clark, who was part of the crew filming the documentary, which was later narrated by “Jurassic Park” actor Sir Sam Neill.
Liam said his friends were suspicious. “They didn’t believe me at all,” he said.
He, Jessin, and Kaiden—whom the brothers consider another sibling—affectionately call the fossils “Brothers.”
Based on the size of the tibia, experts estimate that the dino was 13 to 15 years old at the time of death and probably weighed around 3,500 pounds—about two-thirds the size of a full-grown adult.
Finally, a Black Hawk helicopter transported the plaster-covered mass to a waiting truck to take it to the Denver Museum.
Lyson said more than 100 individual T. rex fossils have been discovered, but many are fragmentary. It is not yet clear how complete this fossil is. So far, they know they’ve found a leg, a hip, a pelvis, a couple of tail bones and a good chunk of skull, Lyson said.
The public will be able to watch crews remove the stone, which the museum estimates will take about a year.
“We wanted to share the making of this fossil with the public because it’s a remarkable feeling,” Lyson said.
Jessin, a fan of the “Jurassic Park” movies and an aspiring paleontologist, continued to search for fossils and only a few days ago found the turtle shell.
He had this advice for other kids: “Just put away the electronics and go for a hike.”