With so many fossils already uncovered, finding the next one may be more about timing than anything else.
Seventeen-year-old Kevin Terris was the latest amateur to stumble upon a rare dinosaur fossil. Just a few days after paleontologists inspected the very same area, the high school student spotted a piece of exposed bone from the near complete skeleton of a baby Parasaurolophus, or "duck-billed dinosaur," according to the press release.
The discovery was made in 2009, but announced Tuesday by the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology.
"It's a little embarrassing to walk by something like that," admitted Andrew Farke, one of the unlucky paleontologists and current curator of the museum, "but he was just in the right place at the right time, looking in the right direction."
"At first I was interested in seeing what the initial piece of bone sticking out of the rock was," Terris said about his fortunate find at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. "When we exposed the skull, I was ecstatic."
The duck-billed skeleton, nicknamed "Joe, is the most complete specimen of its kind on record, the museum reported. Duck-billed dinosaurs were plant-eaters who lived in Northwest North America around 75 million years ago.
Before Terris' find, the best representations of Parasaurolophus dinosaurs were partial skulls, according to the press release. Making his discovery more remarkable was the fact that Joe was a baby -- only a year old. Infant dinosaur fossils are rare, according to The Guardian. The dinosaur would have been about 6-feet in length with the potential to reach 25 feet.
