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8-year-old boy digs up rare dinosaur skull

September 13,2016

      KUSA - An 8-year-old boy from Florida dug up a rare and nearly complete dinosaur skull at Mygatt-Moore Quarry.

      Lachlan Barrett was on a “Dino Dig” with his grandma in Rabbit Valley, which is close to the Colorado-Utah border.

      “I used to dig in the dirt when I was a baby and I thought everything was a dinosaur bone,” Lachlan said.

      But this time – Lachlan really did find a dinosaur bone. It was an Apatosaurus skull.

                 skull as discovered in June, picture courtesy of Museums of Western Colorado.   (Photo: KUSA)

      “We just laid it to the side and once they saw it, they figured out that we found an Apatosaurus bone and they really caught our attention,” Lachlan said. 

      After Lachlan helped dust off the top of the snout, crews from the Museums of Western Colorado took almost two months to excavate the rest of the skull. Lachlan came across the skull in June and it was removed from the quarry on Aug. 19.

          Skull in field jacket after the pull, picture courtesy of Museums of Western Colorado.   (Photo: KUSA)

      “Something that really amazed me was – there was this lady that worked there for 30 years and she hadn’t seen a bone like that in 30 years,” Lachlan said.

      The skull is really rare. Researchers at the museum think there are only three other nearly complete skulls in the world.

      “I love dinosaurs,” Lachlan said. “I want to be a geneticist when I grow up, so I can bring dinosaurs back to life."

      He says Velociraptor’s are his favorite.

      They are fast and intelligent like me,” Lachlan said.

      We found a few schools for Lachlan to keep an eye on.

      The U.S. News and World Report says the best schools for genetics and molecular biology are Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California in San Francisco.

      The skull will be prepared by staff at the Dinosaur Journey Museum in Fruita over the winter.

 

--------This article was originally published by Louise Macdonald, KUSA.

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