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Denver Museum Still Working To Dig Up Details On Dinosaur

Courtesy of Denver Museum of Nature & Science
On May 16, a Highlands Ranch construction crew uncovered dinosaur bones.

Triceratops? Torosaurus? The Denver Museum of Nature and Science isn’t saying for sure what their latest find is yet — except that it’s exciting.

The two dozen fossils found so far, including a lower leg bone and several ribs, are from a horned dinosaur, confirmed the museum’s chief fossil preparator Natalie Toth. Researchers plan to head back to the site later this week.

“There’s still a bone or two that’s still going into the ground,” Toth said. “So as we uncover more, we may have a better idea what kind of horned dinosaur it is.”

The fossils were discovered two weeks ago at a Highlands Ranch construction site. The first batch of bones arrived at the museum Wednesday so they can be cleaned and analyzed.

Toth estimated them to be roughly 66 to 68 million years old.

Credit Denver Museum of Nature and Science
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“It’s just so unbelievable to me that we’re in a metropolitan area and we truly have dinosaurs in our backyard,” she said. “Sometimes you get a call like this or you get folks that will bring what they think are fossils up to the window, but often times they’re rocks or pieces of petrified wood, which are still interesting. But to go out there and have it actually be part of a dinosaur is pretty spectacular.”

It’s not the first time this has happened, though. Two years ago, a torosaurus skull was found on a construction site in Thornton. In 1992, part of a T-rex was found in Littleton.

Stacy was KUNC's arts and culture reporter from 2015 to 2021.
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