A recent high-school graduate discovered a rare baby dinosaur in 2009 when prospecting for fossils in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Kevin Terris noticed a bone sticking out of a hoodoo (a "mushroom-shaped rock formation") and alerted Alf paleontologist Andy Farke, who was leading the exploration, the Joe the Dinosaur website reported.
Prospecting means looking for bones on the surface, which is exactly what the students and paleontologists were doing when they stumbled upon "Joe" the hadrosaur.
The dino was technically a Parasaurolophus, which is a 75 million-year-old duck-billed creature. The Parasaurolophus also had a "long hollow bony tube" on its head, which may have been used for trumpeting.
When Terris pointed out the dinosaur bone Farke wrote it off as only a piece of a ribcage, which are common and have little scientific value. The bone would also be extremely difficult to remove from the hoodoo.
When Farke turned over a rock on the opposite side of the formation, he was surprised to find the skull of what appeared to be a baby dinosaur. When he took a closer look at the originally-spotted bone he noticed it was actually toes as opposed to a ribcage.
With a head on one side of the hoodoo and toes on the other, the excited explorers believed there could be a complete dinosaur in between.
"Everyone was practically shaking with excitement as they realized what Kevin had found. The small size of the bones indicated a baby dinosaur-a rare find indeed!" The site stated.
The only problem was that the group was supposed to leave in only two days, and they did not have the tools or the permission to start and excavation.
A year later, a crew from the Alf Museum and Webb Schools got permits from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to dig up the ancient bones.
The team shaved down the rock that contained the bones with a jackhammer; the bones were given a thick plaster coating to keep them from getting damaged in the process.
"With the top surface protected, the block containing the skeleton was flipped over onto a cushion of loose sand. More excess rock was trimmed away, and then the exposed rock and bone were given a plaster bandage," the website stated.
The 1,000-pound fossil was then picked up by a helicopter and brought to a lab for study.
The dinosaur's leg bone helped researchers determine its age.
"Dinosaurs have yearly growth rings in their bone tissue, like trees. But we didn't see even one ring. That means it grew to a quarter of adult size in less than a year," co-author Sarah Werning of Stony Brook University, said. Joe was only six feet long and a year old, but would have been about 25 feet long as an adult.
The team found the Parasaurolophus grew its unusual headgear before it reached the age of one year. Joe is now the most digitally accessible dinosaur fossil in the world.
WATCH:
WATCH:
