SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : DINOSAUR SURPRISE

'' UNDER a museum parking lot - a new dinosaur find '' : Have you ever searched for a pair of glasses, only to realize that they were on your head the whole time?

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is filled with exhibits of dinosaur skeletons. And its scientists discovered a dinosaur fossil deep below the surface of one of its own parking lots, the museum announced this week.

The fossil, estimated to be about 70 million years old, was buried 763 feet [ 233 meters ] below the surface and unearthed because of a drilling project. The museum wanted to understand the geology to see if it would be possible to replace natural gas with geothermal systems to heat and cool the museum.

Two drilling rigs bored test holes under one of the museum's parking lots. On Jan 30, one of the museum's geologists, who was sifting through what had been extracted, immediately recognized that dinosaur bone, sending museum staff members into a frenzy.

James Hagadorn, the museum's curator of geology, stepped out of a parent-teacher conference as his phone lit up with texts. '' There are never fossil emergencies,'' Dr. Hagadorn said in an interview. '' But that was a fossil emergency.''

The fossil extracted is cylindrical and just inches long and it is quite likely part of a bigger bone. To date it, scientists used the moment in time when dinosaurs went extinct as a result of an asteroid [ known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary ] as a measuring stick.  

That event left a mark - a narrow horizon marked by a layer of clay - that is visible all over Colorado.

To arrive at an estimated age of 70 million years, scientists used the existing map of the horizon and measured the depth of various notable fossil discoveries in the area and compared them to the one in January.

The fossil is too small to be linked to a specific dinosaur, though the team at the museum hypothesizes that it belonged to an ornithopod, a small herbivore.

The World Students Society thanks Sopan Deb.