12-year-old boy finds 69-million-year-old fossil on hike in Canada

A 12-year-old boy with dreams of becoming a paleontologist got a kickstart on his career goals this summer when he stumbled upon the bones of a 69-million-year-old dinosaur. Nathan Hrushkin and his dad Dion were hiking on a conservation area in Canada’s Horseshoe Canyon in July when they came across partially exposed bones. “My dad and I have been visiting this property for a couple of years, hoping to find a dinosaur fossil, and we’ve seen lots of little bone fragments,” he said in a statement. This time, however, his discovery was more than a fragment, and after sending photos to the Royal Tyrrell Museum for confirmation, Nathan soon learned that he’d come across the bones of a young hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur. Because fossil reports from Horseshoe Canyon are rare, the museum sent a team out to the site, where they found an additional 30 to 50 bones in the walls of the canyon, the conservancy said. Experts determined that the bones – four limbs, hips, shoulders and a partial skull – all belong to the same creature, a hadrosaur estimated to be about three or four years old. Though, the conservancy said that hadrosaurs are the most common fossils found in the area, Nathan’s discovery is special because of the dino’s age and because it was found in a rock formation.