MANSFIELD: Not each and every kid can say he created the discovery of a lifetime before he began kindergarten. Wylie Brys can.
The 4-year-old from southeast Arlington was searching for fish fossils in Mansfield last fall with his dad, Tim, when the preschooler came back with a bone that has excited even seasoned paleontologists from Southern Methodist University.
The 3-inch chunk turned out to be part of a nodosaur, a 94-million-year-old dinosaur that looked like at, squatty cow with armour,” stated Michael Polcyn, an SMU paleontologist.
The scientists were initially skeptical about what they would find on the building site near the new Sprouts Farmers Market place less than one hundred yards from busy Matlock Rd.
They thought the bone was possibly from a plesiosaur, which “we have all over the Metroplex,” SMU paleontologist Dale Winkler stated.
“We were not expecting to discover a lot of it,” Winkler mentioned. “It looked like the bones had been spread around. We started digging and 1 bone connected to a further bone that connected to another bone that connected to an additional bone.”
The paleontologists, along with volunteers from the Dallas Paleontological Society, started digging April three and unearthed “more than 50 per cent” of the nodosaur, a single of only five ever found in the Metroplex and the initially in decades.
An adult, a child and a skull have been identified in Fort Worth, Texas, and a couple of bones have been located near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, but none since the 1990s, Winkler stated.
And this come across is the most total of all, said SMU paleontologist Louis Jacobs, author of Lone Star Dinosaurs.
“Much of the skeleton is there,” Jacobs mentioned. “We don’t know how considerably. We took out legs, the backbone and ribs.”
