Student hits dinosaur jackpot

POCATELLO — A paleontology graduate student on a stroll with his father stumbled upon more dinosaur bones in one day than had previously been discovered in the state's history.

Jason Moore stopped at a stone outcropping on a southeast Idaho hillside to give his father a lesson in fossil hunting.

"I happened to glance down and said, 'That large pile on the ground is bone,' " said Moore, who studies paleontology at Cambridge University.

Moore and his parents scoured the hillside, finding more fragments. When they found bone still attached to the ground, Moore realized a dinosaur was buried in the earth below.

His discovery in late June provided a lead to the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in Idaho, and it doubled the number of known dinosaur bones in Idaho. The location remains secret to keep people away.

Experts say the animal was probably a large herbivore, perhaps a Tenontosaurus. The plant-eating dinosaur lived in North America during the late Early Cretaceous Period, which began about 89 million years ago and lasted about 16 million years.

This summer, experts from Idaho State University started Idaho's first extensive search for dinosaur fossils in hopes of stocking the Museum of Natural History's Dinosaur Times in Idaho exhibit.

A few weeks ago, Ralph Chapman, the museum exhibit's affiliate curator, went into the field with other archaeologists to dig out the buried bones found by Moore and bring them back to the museum for preparation.

"We were all stupefied." Chapman said. "It took us about 10 hours to go from the small amount of exposed bone they found to the very large block of bone and associated material we removed."

Most of the bones are from the animal's hindquarters.

Paleontologists believe Tenontosaurus traveled in herds and was an important food source for larger meat-eating dinosaurs. It grew to 25 feet long and had a long tail.

Until now, most dinosaur hunters have avoided Idaho, where soil and vegetation cover rocks and make searching difficult.

Montana State University paleontologist Frankie Jackson said searching in Idaho requires spending more time driving than digging.

"Because it's not an area that's been prospected extensively, anything you find there is going to be important," Jackson said.