Denver dino museum makes 'historically thrilling' discovery under own parking lot

DENVER (KDVR) - The Denver Museum of Nature and Science announced on Wednesday that it discovered a nearly 70-million-year-old dinosaur fossil underneath its parking lot in January.

The partial-bone fossil was found 763 feet below the lot during a geothermal test drilling project, according to the museum.

“This is a scientifically and historically thrilling find for both the Museum and the larger Denver community,” said Dr. James Hagadorn, the curator of geology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS), in a statement.

The museum said the fossil is the deepest and oldest dinosaur fossil ever found within Denver city limits.

“This fossil comes from an era just before the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, and it offers a rare window into the ecosystem that once existed right beneath modern-day Denver," Hagadorn said.

The fossil bone has been identified as a vertebrae of an herbivorous dinosaur, according to the museum, which said the bone occurs in Late Cretaceous rocks that are dated to approximately 67.5 million years ago.

Dr. Patrick O'Connor, director of Earth & Space Science at the DMNS, was part of the team that identified the bone and said it may be "the most unusual dinosaur discovery" he had ever been a part of.

"Not only is it exceptionally rare to find any fossil as part of a drilling project, but the discovery provided an outstanding collaborative opportunity for the Museum earth sciences team to produce an article," O'Connor said.

That article, "Denver's deepest dinosaur," was published in the scientific journal Rocky Mountain Geology in June. The research was led by DMNS postdoctoral scholar Dr. Holger Petermann.

"This fossil underscores the highly fossiliferous nature of the entire D1 Sequence (Denver Formation) and increases the diversity of dinosaurs known from the Denver metropolitan area," reads an excerpt from the article's abstract.

The fossil bone is now currently on display at the DMNS in its "Discovering Teen Rex" exhibition.