Texas boy, 4, finds 100-million-year-old dinosaur fossil

A four-year-old Texas boy stumbled upon a 100-million-year-old dinosaur bone while fish fossil hunting with his dad at a mall construction site, reports say.

Experts from Southern Methodist University in Dallas excavated the site on Tuesday and believe the rare fossils could belong to a nodosaur — a plant-eating armoured dinosaur about the size of a small horse that lived in the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous periods, The Dallas Morning News reports.

In September, zookeeper Tim Brys brought his son Wiley to the under-construction retail centre near their house in Mansfield to hunt for fish fossils.

“We were finding some fish vertebrae in the hillside, and then Wiley walked a little ways ahead of me and came back with a piece of bone. And I paused and was like, ‘OK, where did you find this?'” Brys told NBC Dallas.

Initially Brys told Wiley the fossil belonged to a turtle, but researchers analyzed the find and made the astonishing discovery.

“It’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Brys told NBC. “And he was four.”

Source: Canoe.ca