By: Amelia Wang
On July 31, 2022, Jessin Fisher, his brother Liam, and his cousin Kaiden Madsen decided to go fossil hunting in the Hell Creek Formation in the North Dakota Badlands. Although they had known that the area was rich in dinosaur fossils, the trio of boys hoped to find only a few. However, they didn’t realize that they were about to find one of the only juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered!
The events that led up to this fascinating discovery started when Liam and his dad, Sam Fisher, noticed a long, grayish white bone poking out of the ground.
“My dad hollered for Jessin and Kaiden to come, and they came running up on the butte,” Liam told The Washington Post. “Dad asked, ‘What is this?’ and Jessin said, ‘That’s a dinosaur.’”
Later, Sam sent a picture of the fossil to a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Dr. Tyler Leyson, who confirmed Jessin’s hunch. In 2023, after receiving the necessary permits, Dr. Lyson organized an excavation team, which included the original three boys. Dr. Lyson had originally thought that the bone was the fossil of a duckbill dinosaur, which is a more commonly found species.
However, not long after arriving at the site, Lyson and Jessin found what seemed to be a T-rex tooth.
“Instead of finding cervical vertebrae, we found the lower jaw with several teeth sticking out of it,” Dr. Lyson told the Associated Press. “And it doesn’t get any more diagnostic than that, seeing these giant tyrannosaurus teeth staring back at you.”
The dinosaur bones were enclosed in a 6000 lb, eight-foot-wide piece of sandstone. In total, it took 11 days to excavate the entire fossil, which included the dinosaur’s lower leg, hips, pelvis, tail vertebrae, and nearly all of its skull. Most surprisingly, those bones were all well preserved.
The researchers believe that the T-rex was approximately 25 feet long and ten feet tall. It most likely weighed about 3500 lb, which is roughly two-thirds of the size of a mature adult. They suspect the T-rex was around 13 to 15 years old when it died approximately 67 million years ago.
“Juvenile T-rex specimens are extremely rare,” Dr. Lyson said. “This find is significant to researchers because the ‘Teen Rex’ specimen may help answer questions about how the king of dinosaurs grew up.”
The three boys, Liam, Jessin, and Kaiden, named the young T-rex, “The Brothers.” It was put on display at the Denver Museum on June 21, 2024. The new exhibition was entitled, “Discovering The Teen Rex,” which includes a documentary retelling the boys’ exciting discovery.