Digging up Bones as kids discover remains of a T-Rex

NORTH DAKOTA – What did you do for summer vacation? Three pre-teen dinosaur aficionados have the answer of a lifetime: they discovered the remains of a rare juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex in the North Dakota dirt.

Scientists and filmmakers announced Tuesday that brothers Liam and Jessin Fisher, age 7 and 10, and their nine-year-old cousin Kaiden Madsen, were walking in the Hell Creek formation of the Badlands in July 2022 when they found a large fossilized leg bone. “It still gives me goosebumps,” Lyson recalled on the call. Kaiden’s reaction to learning it was a T-Rex? “This is pretty cool, I can’t believe we just found this.”

“Dad asked ‘What is this?’ and Jessin said, ‘That’s a dinosaur!'” exclaimed young Liam on a video call with his brother, cousin, father Sam Fisher, dinosaur experts and reporters. They snapped a pic and sent it to a family friend, vertebrate paleontologist Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, according to a statement.

When Lyson eventually arrived at the site, he brushed off a tooth and quickly realized the enormity of what the fossil hunters uncovered: an “extremely rare” juvenile T-Rex specimen that lived 67 million years ago – and could offer critical clues about how the king of dinosaurs grew up.