Awesome - Old Purse Found Underneath High School Has Shocking Contents Inside
More often than not, you can find 12-year-old Nathan Hrushkin and his father, Dion, up to their knees in dirt and dust. They don’t do it for fun; The duo is on the search for ancient treasure, and they know exactly what to look out for in their quest to get their hands on something meaningful. Still, Nathan couldn't help but be drawn to a rock that was sitting almost cartoonishly at the top of a dusty hill...
Aspiring Paleontologist
As an aspiring paleontologist, Nathan wants nothing more than to be knee-deep in the dirt at Horseshoe Canyon, where ancient bones are believed to be hidden beneath the surface. It takes a lot of patience if you want to find something special.
Something Rare
Luckily for Nathan, he has patience to spare. Still, when he arrived at Horseshoe Canyon with his dad (left) one special day, he thought the most he’d find would be a few rocks and a lizard or two. The Canada natives had no idea he was about to stumble upon something much more rare.
All About Dinosaurs
Like a lot of kids, Nathan loves learning about some of the oldest known creatures to have walked the earth — dinosaurs. Prehistoric times were crawling with all kinds of creatures we’d find monstrous today, but all that remains of this time period are bones.
Bone Fragments
Believe it or not, Nathan had encountered a few chunks of prehistoric life in the past. He and Dion had found multiple bone fragments at Horseshoe Canyon, but never anything substantial enough to identify. Still, if fragments exist, an intact bone could be anywhere.
Where To Start?
Searching for dinosaur bones is like participating in a weird, dusty scavenger hunt: You follow the fragments, unsure if you’re being led to or away from your ultimate goal. Ancient history was waiting beneath Nathan’s feet, but he just didn’t know where exactly to start digging.
Horseshoe Canyon
But there was something different about that particular day, when Nathan and Dion decided to hike through a conservation site in Horseshoe Canyon. They were near the place they’d found the bone fragments, which gave the aspiring paleontologist an idea.
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Up The Hill
Nathan realized that the bone fragments, which they had found at the bottom of a hill, may have washed down from farther up the hill. If that was true, then there could be more fragments at the top of the hill, and perhaps even something intact.
The Discovery
The father and son paused the hike to eat lunch, but Nathan’s curiosity got the better of him. He just had to know what was at the top of that hill, so he hiked up alone. Within minutes, he started yelling. “Dad, you need to get up here.”
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Strangely-Shaped Rock
“As soon as he said that, I could tell by the tone of his voice that he found something,” Dion later told CNN. What Nathan found, though, probably wouldn’t have looked like much to the average person: A strangely shaped rock, jutting up from the dirt.
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That's No Rock
But Nathan immediately knew that this was no rock. In fact, he said the object was so obviously a fossil that it looked like “a scene on a TV show or a cartoon or something.” Carefully, they took pictures of the supposed-fossil and sent them to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology for analysis.
The Anticipation
Nathan and Dion weren't amateurs — they knew that it was illegal for them to disturb any fossils found in Alberta, Canada. Still, the anticipation was killing them. After all this time, had they finally found a vestige from prehistoric times?
Good News
When the Museum of Paleontology immediately sent a team of paleontologists to the site, Nathan and Dion knew they’d found something extraordinary. It took two months of careful digging and excavation, but the experts were finally able to give Nathan some good news.
Hadrosaur
The fossil he’d found was actually a fully intact humerus bone from the Late Cretaceous Period. The more they dug, the more bones they uncovered, all of which — including Nathan’s discovery — belonged to a single duck-billed dinosaur called a hadrosaur.
Juvenile Dino
Just like Nathan, the hadrosaur was a kid. The hadrosaur was estimated to have been around 3-4 years old when it died, which according to experts makes Nathan’s discovery extremely valuable, and not just because it was uncovered by a 12-year-old.
Very Important Discovery
“This young hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about,” said François Therrien, the museum’s curator of dinosaur palaeoecology. According to him, Nathan’s eagle eye could have a huge impact.
Dinosaur Extinction
Since very few juvenile skeletons have been found in Alberta’s badlands, Nathan and Dion’s discovery is especially exciting. “Nathan and Dion’s find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur extinction,” Therrien said.
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More and More Fossils
The more they searched, the more bones they found. Experts uncovered four limbs, hips, shoulders, and a partial skull from the same individual dinosaur. Apparently, one of the fossil slabs weighed an impressive 1,000 pounds and was more than four feet wide.
Patience is Key
The experts sent the fossils to the museum for further study. Since there are many species of hadrosaur, it will take a while for the experts to figure out which kind of hadrosaur these bones are from. Still, Nathan isn’t giving in to impatience.
Future Paleontologist
Like most paleontologists, Nathan knows that patience is key when you’re trying to uncover millions of years worth of life. “It was pretty fun to be there and watch them do their things,” he said of the paleontologists. In just a few years, Nathan could be right there with them...
Dinosaur Skeleton
Nathan got to see the scattered bones of a hadrosaur in person, but imagine if he had discovered a fully-intact T. rex skeleton? This would obviously be a huge longshot, especially since only a handful of T. rex skeletons have been assembled in the world.
King of the Dinos
At the time of Jurassic Park’s production, in the entire world, just seven or eight full T. rex skeletons had been recovered by paleontologists. Fast forward to today, experts have a much clearer grasp of what the unofficial king of the dinos really looked like.
Recovering Dinosaurs
Over a dozen additional full T. rex skeletons have been recovered from around the world as of 2019. Further study of the remains led to drastically different portraits of the carnivorous beast than science had constructed.
Howdy!
One of the most significant features of the T. rex that came to light was that they were the originators of the business in the front, party in the back lifestyle. That’s right, the most fearsome of the dinosaur community rocked a mullet.
Feathered Friends
The experts deduced that, like the other members of the tyrannosaur species, the T. rex had tufts of feathers running from the top of their heads to down their spines, with a cute little feather fluff at the tips of their tails.
Family Trait
This is purely an assumption though, since the existence of fossilized feathers is far and few between. None of the T. rex skeletal remains show feathers, but a bunch of their cousins do, which points to a strong likelihood it was a family trait.
A feathered mullet isn’t the image that strikes fear in the hearts of men, quite the opposite actually. In fact, the brutish dinosaurs started off nearly cuddly. As hatchlings, it’s believed that the T. rex was born with a peachfuzz-like coat.
If they were among the fraction that survived past infancy, they’d shed their baby feathers, minus the mullet and tail, a feat that just 40% of the T. rex total population would live to see.
Gregory Erickson, a paleontologist from Florida State University explained that the T. rex was sort of like the “The James Dean of Dinosaurs.” The actor passed away at age 24, and famously uttered the quote “Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.”
T. rexes weren't here long, but they were magnificent to behold. Based on the growth rings observable on dinosaur bones, much like the concentric markings of trees, paleontologists pinpointed the ages at the time of death to be usually before 30 years.
Within that three-decade lifespan, the T. rex spent most of its time packing on the pounds. In their journey from fuzzy hatchling to a gargantuan terrifying beast, the T. rex would gain around 1,700 lbs, topping out at a staggering 9 tons.
Paleontologists think the short arms of a T.rex were totally purposeless. Similar to the human appendix and wisdom teeth, their arms were passed down from early tyrannosaur species, who could function with a tiny wingspan.
Luckily, the T. rex perfected the eating process by scooping prey up in their menacing jaws. As Mark Norell, a curator for the American Museum of Natural History explained, “the predator had the rare ability to bite through solid bone and digest it.”
That fascinating bit of information came from studying fossilized dinosaur poop. Who knew that existed!? Chemical testing determined that the excrement held pulverized bits of bones that had been exposed to digestive acids in the stomach.
If the tooth fairy visited T. rexes, they’d never have time for anyone else. All the teeth inside that mammoth dino cranium regrew every two years, so it was a constant cycle of losing their fangs.
Constant tooth regeneration secured the T. rex's spot for the most powerful jaw of any creature in history. Their prey was crushed with the force of 7,800 lbs, which would be like having three Mini Coopers dropped on top of you.
Experts debated whether the T. rex was only a hunter, or if they also dabbled in scavenging dead animals. It was determined that they ate their own based on fossilized waste examinations. Though the question remained, did they eat prey alive?
Based on the evidence available so far, all signs point to T. rexes as strictly bloodthirsty carnivorous hunters, not scavengers. One mischaracterization that Steven Spielberg included in his film is that their eye position limited their sight to tracking only moving objects.
That’s pure fabrication. With peepers the size of oranges, the T. rex could clock a meal using its unparalleled depth perception, thanks to the large distance between its forward-facing eyes.
If you found yourself face to face with a hungry T. rex, you could've outrun it — because they couldn’t run! Similar to the limbs of an elephant, the hind legs remained fairly straight with at least one limb keeping balance on the ground.
At birth, paleontologists say the underdeveloped dinosaurs were capable of running but that decreased with growth. But the T. rex had no issue catching its food. It was a master speed walker, gliding along in lengthy strides of about 10 to 25 mph.
One fact debated amongst paleontologists is the coloring of a T. rex. In films, they have muted earth-toned reptilian hides, though there’s no science to support that. All it would take is one small scientific discovery to prove they were vividly colorful.
The tricky part is knowing where to search for the remaining evidence of the dinosaurs. What looks like a craggy rock surface, withering from time and the elements, could be a paleontological goldmine in disguise.
In the 1980s, a team of workers stumbled upon something extraordinary in the highlands of Bolivia: some sort of pattern imprinted in a near-vertical cliff. The site is located near Sucre, the capital of Bolivia, which is nestled in the foothills of the Andes mountains.
Miners contracted by a Bolivian cement company named Fancesca had been excavating an area about three miles from Sucre.
The more they chipped away at the rock, the more they noticed this strange pattern in the walls of the quarry.
This wasn't just any pattern — it was a trail of actual dinosaur footprints. The site, dubbed Cal Orcko, is now considered extremely important to the world of paleontology, with secrets still being uncovered to this day.
The Cal Orcko quarry features a huge limestone wall that stretches 4,000 feet across and 250 feet high — and is covered with almost 5,000 dinosaur prints!
In 1998, Christian Meyer of the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland, arrived at the site with a research team. They spent the next few months studying the wall, and concluded that there was nowhere else in the world with a more extensive collection of dinosaur footprints.
At 269,100 square feet, the area contains footprints from nearly 300 different dinosaur species in all. One of these creatures is thought to have been at least 80 feet tall, while the largest footprint is three feet long!
Cal Orcko is providing scientists the opportunity to learn more about these fantastic creatures. “There is no comparable site in the world,” Meyer said in an interview.
Footprints found at the site belonged to such dinosaurs like Carnotaurus, a predatory animal with small arms and legs; as well as the Ankylosaurus, a herbivore with an armored exterior and a club-like tail. There are even footprints from the Titanosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur that once weighed more than 100 tons!
Cal Orcko also features the longest known set of dinosaur tracks at 1,150 feet, created by a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, whom a team of researchers named Johnnie Walker.
But that wasn't all. Researchers have discovered dinosaur bones as well as evidence of crocodiles and fish, leading experts to believe that Cal Orcko was once a lake where these creatures would bathe and drink.
Scientists also claim that the damp climate was ideal for dinosaurs to leave deep footprints in the soft ground. As the area became more dry, these footprints hardened as were preserved. This cycle repeated year after year, forming several layers of footprints.
Of course, the landscape shifted along with tectonic activity. This explains why the footprints seem to be marching in a vertical direction — the rock was simply pushed upward.
Not surprisingly, Cal Orcko is a popular site for tourists. In 2006, the Parque Cretácico museum opened to showcase models and explain the area's rich prehistoric past. There's even a viewing platform for visitors to observe the footprints in the limestone walls.
New discoveries at Cal Orcko are still being discovered to this day with all of its industrial projects and ever-shifting landscape. “It’s just amazing,” says Maria Teresa Gamón, a guide at the site. “We see fresh footprints and fossils all the time. We lose some, we find some. It’s always changing.”
That point was proven perfectly in April 2015 with the discovery of a whopping 5,000 new footprints, including two sets that once belonged to a previously unknown species. There's no telling what they'll find next.
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