The SMU scientists started excavating the dinosaur bones on Friday. They speculate the bones belong to a group of dinosaurs called Nodosaurs — herbivorous creatures that lived in the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous periods.
The fossil bones of a 100 million-year-old dinosaur discovered at a shopping center construction site will be studied and identified by paleontologists at Southern Methodist University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by journalist Dominique Mosbergen, reporting for The Huffington Post.
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The story was published April 8, 2015.
EXCERPT:
By Dominique Mosbergen
The Huffington Post
A 4-year-old and his dad were looking for fossils in Mansfield, Texas, when the boy made an incredible discovery. There, buried in the dirt, the child reportedly found rare, 100-million-year-old dinosaur bones.Last September, Tim Brys, a keeper at the Dallas Zoo, brought his son, Wiley, to the site of a future shopping center to conduct a fossil hunt, NBC News reported. The earth had been dug up to make way for the development, and Brys said he had hoped to find some fish fossils buried there.
“We commonly go collect fossils as something we can do together to be outside. Wiley enjoys coming with me on my trips,” Brys told the news outlet.
That day, the father and son reportedly did find some fish vertebrae at the site. But Wiley went on to make a far more astonishing discovery.
[Wiley] walked up ahead of me and found a piece of bone,” Brys told the Dallas Morning News. “It was a pretty good size and I knew I had something interesting.”
He was right.
According to scientists at Southern Methodist University, Wiley had stumbled upon some rare dinosaur bones, estimated to date back 100 million years.
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