A Colorado museum hit the Jurassic jackpot.
A team of scientists at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science discovered a dinosaur fossil hundreds of feet beneath the building’s parking lot earlier this year.
The scientists were digging scientific cores in January to test whether the museum could convert from natural gas to geothermal energy. That’s when they discovered a fossil 800 feet beneath the surface.
“If you had drilled the well two feet over, might not have hit it,” James Hagadorn, the curator of geology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, told NBC affiliate KUSA. “So it’s pretty amazing.”
Hagadorn said the fossil turned out to be both Denver’s deepest and oldest dinosaur fossil at 70 million years old. He and his team determined the bone was the vertebrae of a plant-eating dinosaur similar to a Edmontosaurus or Thescelosaurus.
While the museum is filled with fossils, the latest discovery is especially rare. Hagadorn believes it is “the only dinosaur bone from a core in the world that you can go see” and one of only three that have been discovered on the planet.
“It’s a needle, inside of a needle, inside of a haystack,” he said.