The trio discovered the bone, likely entombed around 67 million years ago, on land near Marmarth, North Dakota. In July 2022, two young brothers and their cousin were wandering through a fossil-rich stretch of the North Dakota badlands when they made a discovery that left them “completely speechless”: a T. rex bone poking out of the ground.
The trio announced their find publicly on Monday (3 June) as workers at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science prepared to extract the fossil from its rock encasement at a special exhibit titled "Discovering Teen Rex." A crew with Giant Screen Films was there to capture the discovery. The film, titled "T.
REX", will debut at the exhibit's opening on 21 June. “It was electric. You got goosebumps,” recalled Dave Clark, who was part of the crew filming the documentary that later was narrated by Jurassic Park actor Sir Sam Neill.
The adventure began when Kaiden Madsen, then 9, joined his cousins, Liam and Jessin Fisher, then 7 and 10, on a hike through land owned by the Bureau of Land Management near Marmarth, North Dakota. “You just never know what you are going to find out there. You see all kinds of cool rocks and plants and wildlife," says the brothers' father, Sam Fisher.
Liam Fisher recalled that he and his dad, who accompanied the trio, first spotted the bone of the young carnivore. After its death around 67 million years ago, the T. rex had been buried in the Hell Creek Formation, a renowned paleontological site spanning Montan.
