'The Nation's T. rex': How a Montana mom's hike led to an incredible discovery

[yortsed snacilbuper]

FORT PECK RESERVOIR, Mont. — A long time ago, in a part of this state that is now arid desert but was then humid swampland, an egg hatched. It was the beginning of an epoch-spanning life story that continues still, beginning a new chapter this week in the nation’s capital.

The egg is long gone. The skin and muscle of the animal that climbed out of it — 38 feet long and six tons once it grew — are history (or prehistory). But when it died on the banks of a creek after 18 good years at the top of the food chain, its bones settled into the enveloping mud. The current teased away the flesh, pushed its skull a few feet downstream, shifted a shoulder blade.

But more sediment filtered down, locking the skeleton in a geologic hug that would go unbroken — through 66 million winters, the collision of continents, the rise of mammals — until just before 9 a.m. on Labor Day in 1988, when Kathy Wankel caught a glimpse of that shoulder blade.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-nations-t-rex-how-a-montana-moms-hike-led-to-an-incredible-discovery/2019/06/01/2bd276f8-8252-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html?utm_term=.9e07c9fc457a&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

[ffr]

1. Why doesn't that ever happen to me? I'm always looking for fossils. I give up!

Great story!

[yaesu]

2. When I was a kid, many, many moons ago, I found a clovis point arrow head sticking

out of the ground while walking to school, cutting across a field behind the school. Figure its about 13k years old. Later, I found what looks to be a small skinning tool made out of flint. Figure there was a paleoindian summer camp there as it sits on a high ridge overlooking a 900 acre lake.

[Comatose Sphagetti]

3. Been hunting arrowheads for 45 years.

Have yet to find a clovis.
Congrats!

[csziggy]

4. Find a local fossil club and go with them

They know where to look and can give you tips.

Though that might not help. My sister is very involved with the Tampa Bay Fossil Club and goes on digs with them and other groups. She's been known to find fossils on the path into major digs - paths that experienced people have walked along every day for years and never saw what she found.

She recently went on a dig in South Dakota and found a hadrosaur fossil and a crocodillian tooth that the people in charge of that site had missed and were amazed at the quality. She found a jaw in 1993 and it turned out to be a new species of smilodon (saber tooth cat) that they named for her since she found the holotype fossil for the species.

[Javaman]

5. I love the phrase, "66 million winters". nt

[ffr]

6. That didn't go unnoticed with me either. Great phrase!