The most significant paleological discovery to hit Maryland in 100 years – the uncovering of a historic "bone bed" – was announced earlier this month.
But getting to the bottom of the fossil collection and documenting it all took researchers about 10 years.
In 2013, an employee at Dinosaur Park – a small fossil preserve in Laurel, Maryland – first spotted something blue-green buried in the ground. The former riverbed and mining site had a long history of fossil finds, which tended to reveal themselves with such an aquamarine glimmer. Park staff looked over the spot and decided to leave the bone encased in ironstone and use it for educational purposes.
In 2014, a chance encounter between the same stone and “a piece of heavy landscaping machinery,” TheBaltimore Sun writes, exposed more of the fossil. The collision came as a shock, but scientists at the park decided to let nature ...
