By: Cindy Pu

On July 31, 2021, Jessin Fisher, his brother Liam Fisher, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen went fossil hunting in the Hell Creek Formation in the North Dakota Badlands. They were hoping to find a few dinosaur bones, but instead they stumbled upon something way more valuable!

The trio and Sam Fisher, Jessin and Liam Fisher’s father, found one of only a few young Tyrannosaurus Rex (T. Rex) skeletons ever found in the world! When Liam and his dad saw a long, grey-white bone sticking out of the ground, they called Jessin and Kaiden right away. That’s how their exciting dinosaur discovery began.

Sam sent a photo of the fossil to Dr. Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Dr. Lyson confirmed Jessin’s hunch about the fossil being a dinosaur. In 2023, Dr. Lyson set up an excavation team, which also included the three boys. At first, Dr. Lyson had thought the bone was from a Duckbill dinosaur, a more commonly found fossil, but when he arrived on the site, what they found appeared to be a T. Rex tooth. Not long after, they found three more teeth attached to a jaw.

The incomplete, but well-preserved skeleton included the dinosaur’s lower leg, hips, pelvis, tail vertebrae, and most of its skull. The T. Rex bones were preserved in a massive 6,000-pound, eight-foot-wide chunk of sandstone. It was estimated that the T. Rex was probably twenty-five feet long and ten feet tall, weighing around 3,500-pounds. Researchers believe the T. Rex was between thirteen to fifteen 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.”

Jessin, Liam, and Kaiden named the young dinosaur The Brothers. It went on display at the Denver Museum on June 21, 2024. The exhibit is called Discovering Teen Rex and includes the documentary of the boys’ remarkable dinosaur discovery.