Denver museum finds dinosaur bone under its parking lot
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science already houses a vast trove of dinosaur bones, but it recently received an unexpected addition to the collection. The latest fossil didn’t come from a generous benefactor or anonymous donor–it came from beneath the museum’s own parking lot. “This may be the most unusual dinosaur discovery I have ever been a part of,” DMNS director of Earth and Space Sciences Patrick O’Connor said in a statement. The find happened in January, when the museum began a drilling project to assess the possibility of switchingfrom natural gas to geothermal energy. The test also offered an opportunity for researchers to simultaneously oversee a scientific coring initiative to better understand the Denver Basin’s geology. To do so, a pair of drill rigs each bored a one-foot-wide hole into the ground that the team then used to extract samples. But about 763 feet below the blacktop, geologists found more...