DENVER — Two young brothers and their cousin were wandering through a fossil-rich stretch of the North Dakota badlands when they made a discovery that left them “completely speechless”: a T. rex bone sticking out of the ground.
The trio announced their discovery publicly Monday in a Zoom press conference as workers at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science prepare to begin cutting the fossil from its rock cast in a special exhibit called Discovering Teen Rex. The opening of the exhibition on June 21 will coincide with the debut of the film “T.REX” about the find in July 2022.
It all started when Kaiden Madsen, then 9, joined his cousins, Liam and Jessyn Fisher, then 7 and 10, on a hike through a stretch of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management around Marmarth, North Dakota. Tourism is a favorite activity of the father of the Sam Fisher brothers.
“You just never know what you’re going to find out 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 spotted the young predator’s bone. After its death about 67 million years ago, it was buried in the Hell Creek Formation, a popular paleontological site that spans Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. The formation has yielded some of the best-preserved T. rex fossils. These include Sue, a popular attraction at the Field Museum in Chicago, and Wyrex, a star at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
But none of them knew that then. Liam said he thought the bone sticking out of the rock was what he described as a “short osaurus” – a fancy name for fossil fragments too small to be identified.
Still, Sam Fisher snapped a photo and shared it with family friend Tyler Leeson, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Lyson initially suspected it was a relatively common duck-billed dinosaur. But he organized an excavation that began last summer, adding the boys and a sister, Emmaline Fisher, now 14, to the team.
It wasn’t long before it became apparent that they had found something special. Lyson remembers starting to dig with Jessin where he thought he might find a neck bone.
“Instead of finding a cervical vertebra, we found a mandible with several teeth sticking out of it,” Leeson said. “And there’s no greater diagnosis than seeing those giant tyrannosaurus teeth staring back at you.”
A documentary crew with Giant Screen Films was there to film the discovery.
“It was on. It gives you goosebumps,’ recalled Dave Clarke, 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, Jessyn and Kayden — who the brothers think of as other siblings — affectionately named the fossil “The Brothers.”
Based on the size of the tibia, experts estimate the dinosaur was between 13 and 15 years old when it died and probably weighed about 3,500 pounds — about two-thirds the size of a full-grown adult.
Eventually, a Black Hawk helicopter hoisted the plaster-covered table onto a waiting truck to take it to the museum in Denver.
Lyson said more than 100 individual T. rex fossils have been found, but many are fragmentary. It is not yet clear how complete this fossil is. So far, they know they’ve found a leg, a thigh, a pelvis, several tail bones and a large part of the skull, Lyson said.
The public will be able to watch crews cut away the rock, which the museum says will take about a year.
“We wanted to share the preparation of this fossil with the public because it’s a remarkable feeling,” Lyson said.
Jessin, a Jurassic Park fan and aspiring paleontologist, continued his search for fossils, discovering a turtle shell just a few days ago.
For other kids, he had this advice: “Just put down their electronics and go for a hike.”
