14 DAY TRIAL // There are plenty of kids who are utterly and completely fascinated with dinosaurs, but there aren't all that many who can brag about having found one themselves, let alone helped pull it out of the ground.
5-year-old Wylie Brys from Texas, US, counts himself among these lucky few. Back in September 2014, he and his dad chanced to come across the fossilized remains of such an ancient beast behind a grocery store in Mansfield.
This past Tuesday, young Wylie and his dad Tim were allowed to revisit the site of their discovery and help a team of paleontologists with the South Methodist University excavate the fossilized remains, and they could not be happier about it.
The boy was convinced the bones belonged to a turtle
The boy's dad, Tim Brys, explains that it was his son who drew his attention to the fact that something was buried in the ground behind the grocery store in Mansfield.
Thus, he says that they were just hanging out in the area when Wylie came across a bone fragment, picked it up and showed it to his dad. Given the size of the bone, the man figured out that his son had just made a rather startling discovery.
“He walked up ahead of me and found a piece of bone,” the man said in an interview, as cited by Dallas News. “It was a pretty good size and I knew I had something interesting,” he added.
Not being familiar with the wonders of paleontology, Tim told Wylie that the bone probably belonged to a turtle. Nonetheless, he contacted researchers at the Southern Methodist University, who, after having had a look at the remains, clarified their origin.
The fossilized bones are about 100 million years old
Although the young boy and his dad found the fossilized remains in September 2014, it was just a few days ago that paleontologists got to work excavating them. This is because they first had to secure all the necessary permits to pull them from the ground.
Since they haven't yet had the chance to clean them and closely inspect them, scientists cannot say for sure which species they belong to. Still, they suspect that what they are dealing with is the 100-million-year-old bones of a nodosaur.
By the looks of it, the creature whose skeleton was found by Wylie and his dad Tim was about the size of a modern horse. If the researchers are right and it really was a nodosaur, its looks would have kind of, sort of resembled the body shape of a turtle.
