A construction crew unearthed more than it bargained for while working on a fire and police building in Thornton, Colorado last week. In among the rocks and soil, the crew discovered a 66-million-year-old Triceratops fossil.
As Smithsonian magazine reports, the discovery is especially of note because it contains one of only three complete Triceratops skulls ever uncovered in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The front range of Colorado is heavily paved and populated, and that makes discoveries like this a rarity. The first skeleton was assembled at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in 1905, from a hodgepodge of parts from various skeletons.
Back then, The Washington Post called the skeleton “the most fantastic and grotesque of all that race of giant lizards known as dinosaurs.” Paleontologist Joe Sertich of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science said he’s over the moon about the discovery.
