A 12-year-old boy has discovered a dinosaur skeleton dating back around 69 million years in what paleontologists have described as an important find.
Nathan Hrushkin was out hiking with his father, Dion, and some friends at the remote Horseshoe Canyon near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in July when he spotted a bone protruding out of the ground.
“My dad and I have been visiting this property for a couple of years, hoping to find a dinosaur fossil, and we’ve seen lots of little bone fragments,” Nathan explained.
“This year I was exploring higher up the canyon and found about four bones.”
The aspiring paleontologist has been interested in dinosaurs since he was six, and told the BBC he often goes hiking in the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s protected site in the Albertan Badlands with his father.
“We sent pictures to the Royal Tyrrell Museum and François, the palaeontologist who replied, was able to identify one of the bones as a humerus from the pH๏τos so we knew we’d found something this time,” Nathan said.
Because fossil reports from the Horseshoe Canyon area are rare, the Royal Tyrrell Museum sent a team to the conservation site.
Since Nathan’s find, paleontologists have uncovered between 30 and 50 bones in the canyon’s wall.
The bones belong to a young hadrosaur and have been dated at around 69 million years old. (Nature Conservancy of Canada)
The bones were removed in protective jackets made of burlap and plaster and taken back to the museum lab for cleaning and research.
They have since determined the bones belong to a single specimen – a young hadrosaur estimated to be around three or four years old.
While hadrosaur fossils are common to the region, the Nature Conservancy of Canada says this find is significant due to the time at which it lived.
Fossil discoveries are rare in the geological layer where the hadrosaur was found, which represents a time interval between 71 and 68 million years ago.
“This young hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta,” the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology’s Curator of Dinosaur Palaeoecology, François Therrien, said.
“Nathan and Dion’s find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution.”