Have you ever searched for a pair of glasses, only to realize that they were on your head the whole time?
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is filled with exhibits of dinosaur skeletons. And in the scientific equivalent of tossing couch cushions, its scientists discovered a dinosaur fossil deep — really deep — below the surface of one of its own parking lots, the museum announced this week.
The fossil, estimated to be about 70 million years old, was buried 763 feet below the surface and unearthed because of a drilling project that aimed to better understand the geology of the Denver Basin. The museum wanted to understand the geology to see if it would be possible to replace natural gas with geothermal systems to heat and cool the museum.
Two drilling rigs bore test holes under one of the museum’s paved parking lots, reaching almost 1,000 feet below the surface.
On Jan. 30, one of the museum’s geologists, who was sifting through what had been extracted, immediately recognized the dinosaur bone, sending museum staff members into a frenzy.
James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology, stepped out of a parent-teacher conference as his phone lit up with texts.
“There are never fossil emergencies,” Dr. Hagadorn said in an interview. “But that was a fossil emergency.”
Patrick O’Connor, the museum’s director of earth and space sciences, was interrupted in a meeting.
Dr. O’Connor remarked on how rare it was to find fossils, let alone during a drilling project. “I was like, ‘Oh, is that wishful thinking?’” he said.
The fossil extracted is cylindrical and just inches long, and it is quite likely part of a bigger bone. To date it, scientists used the moment in time when dinosaurs went extinct as a result of an asteroid (known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary) as a measuring stick.
That event left a mark — a narrow horizon marked by a layer of clay — that is visible all over Colorado.
To arrive at the estimated age of 70 million years, scientists used the existing map of the horizon and measured the depth of various notable fossil discoveries in the area and compared them to the one in January.
The fossil is too small to be linked to a specific dinosaur, though the team at the museum hypothesizes that it belonged to an ornithopod, a small herbivore.
The museum team believes that this may be the oldest dinosaur fossil found in the Denver area.
“No one else had actually found this particular type of group of dinosaurs in that interval of this area of Colorado,” Dr. Hagadorn said. “We knew that they should be around. We knew they were from adjacent places. And so that’s another piece of the puzzle that can be put into the overall understanding of that ecosystem.”
Dinosaur fossil discoveries in the Denver area are not new.
Geographically, around the late Cretaceous age (roughly 100 million to 70 million years ago), Colorado was prime real estate for erosion in the highlands, causing deposition of sediment in bodies of water.
As the Rocky Mountains formed, the process sent particles down to what is now modern-day Denver, which efficiently preserved dinosaur fossils.
But those rocks are still relatively close to the surface, making fossils more accessible than in other parts of the world.
In 1993, dinosaur bones were found during construction of Coors Field, the Major League Baseball park where the Colorado Rockies play. That is why the team’s mascot is a purple triceratops named Dinger.
In 2017, construction workers working on a site in Thornton, Colo., found the skull of a torosaurus.
Usually, fossils are discovered much closer to the surface. But what makes the Denver one notable is that it was extracted from deep in the ground.
Before the discovery in January, there were only two known instances of a fossil found in this way.
In 1997, geologists came across a bone fragment some 7,500 feet below the North Sea surface while drilling for oil. Almost a decade later, a Norwegian paleontologist realized that fragment was a limb belonging to a plateosaurus.
Another discovery came in 2018 of an unidentifiable piece of bone from the Morrison Formation in the western part of Colorado.
The different rock layers excavated in Denver represented different environments, such as various bodies of water. It allows scientists to more concretely map out the ecosystem that existed back then.
Museum scientists are confident that there are more fossils buried in the excavated materials from the drilled core, and have been combing through them to see if there are others.
“The find itself isn’t scientifically significant. A single very fragmentary vertebra doesn’t help much in figuring out what dinosaur it is from, but the gee-whiz factor is pretty high,” James Clark, a professor of biology at George Washington University, said in an email, adding, “Dinosaur fossils are not common in rocks, so the chances of hitting one are low.”
Christopher Junium, an associate professor of biology at Syracuse University, called the discovery “extraordinary.”
“Poking the Earth with what amounts to a needle and coming up with a dinosaur is more like fiction than reality,” Dr. Junium said. “Even if the find itself is not that groundbreaking, it is a fun discovery that underscores how much there is to learn when we look at the ground beneath our feet.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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