Woodland Park Paleontology crew uncovers 66-million-year-old ‘teenage’ T-rex fossil
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. (KRDO) -- Tucked away in the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, the Triebold Paleontology crew is studying the bones of the 66 million-year-old fossils of a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex (T-Rex).
The crew discovered the fossils this summer in the badlands of South Dakota on a two-week trip.
"We just wanted to go home. We wanted showers, decent food, to go to see our family and our pets and that sort of thing," said curator Anthony Maltese. "We were like aiming to get out of the field at that point."
Yet after long, discouraging days yielding no discoveries, Maltese says on the morning of their last day, they struck gold.
"About a hundred miles into this trip, according to my pedometer, is when I looked down and I saw these fossils sticking out of the ground."
It was the bones of the T-rex Maltese named "Valerie," after his wife.
Maltese believes the bones belonged to a T-rex around the ages of 15 or 16.
While they don't know exactly what will happen with the T-rex now, it's been transported to the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. There, crews are cleaning and studying its bones to learn about the life it lived millions and millions of years ago.
