High School Student Finds Dinosaur In National Moment: Paleontologists Walked By Youngest, Most Complete Parasaurolophus Skeleton To Date Without Noticing

A high school student found a dinosaur fossil researchers had overlooked-and the find was spectacular.

In 2009, high school student Kevin Terris discovered the dinosaur fossil while  hiking through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

Suddenly, something caught his eye. It turned out to be a much more significant find than he could have predicted.

"At first I was interested in seeing what the initial piece of bone sticking out of the rock was," Terris told scientists. "When we exposed the skull, I was ecstatic!"

Terris had discovered the nearly complete skeleton of a baby Parasaurolophus. The Parasaurolophus was a plant-eating dinosaur, and researchers say that the discovery is the most complete and the youngest skeleton on record for this species of dinosaur.

Reaserchers announced Terris' discovery of the baby Parasaurolophus skeleton, nicknamed, Joe, on Tuesday at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California.

Scientists carefully extracted the rock and, using a microscopic sample of bone tissue, discovered that the duck-billed dinosaur, Joe, was under a year old when it died.

Paleontologists had walked within feet of the bones just days before Terris found them. Joe, who measured six feet in length, would have grown to 25 feet in adulthood.

The study has implications for scientists to understand Parasaurolophus's development. Parasaurolophus has a bony tube on the top of its skull and scientists suspect it was used to emit calls for communication, like a trumpet or other musical instrument. Joe's skull only has a small bump, so scientists think that he probably sounded squeaky and high-pitched as an infant.

"Dinosaurs have yearly growth rings in their bone tissue, like trees. But we didn't see even one ring," said study coauthor Sarah Werning, a professor at Stony Brook University. "That means it grew to a quarter of adult size in less than a year."