By: Nelson Zhang

On July 31, 2022, 10-year-old Jessin Fisher, his 7-year-old brother Liam, and his 9-year-old cousin Kaiden Madsen went to Hell Creek Formation in the North Dakota Badlands to look for fossils. This area is rich with dinosaur bones, and they hoped they could find some. But little did they know they were going to find a teenage T-Rex.

The beginning of this exciting discovery started when the father, Sam Fisher, saw long gray-white bones sticking 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. His dad asked him what that was and Jessin said it was a dinosaur.

Sam sent a couple of photos of the fossils to paleontologist Dr Tyler Lyson at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Dr Tyler Lyson confirmed that the fossils were real and sent an excavation team after getting the permits so they could dig up the fossil. They found some common fossil bones and then dug deeper and found a decent sized T-Rex tooth and then found three more teeth attached to the T-Rex’s jaw.

The bones of the T-Rex started to get much bigger than the other bones and they eventually found the bones encased in a massive 6,000-pound (2,700 kg,) eight-foot-wide (2.4 m) chunk of sandstone. It took as much as 11 days to clear out the sandstone and found a preserved bone of the dinosaur’s lower leg, hips, pelvis, tail vertebrae, and most of its skull.

The researchers said that they have found a teenage T-Rex! It was 25 feet (7.6 m) long and 10 feet (3 m) tall and weighed around 3,500 pounds (1,600 kg), almost weighing the same amount as 20 adults.