On July 31, 2022, Jessin Fisher, aged 10, his 7-year-old brother Liam, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen, aged 9, discovered a rare teenage Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton while fossil hunting in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota.
The area is well known for its abundance of dinosaur bones, and the boys had set out hoping to find some interesting fossils. Instead, they stumbled upon one of the few juvenile T. rex skeletons ever found.
The discovery started when Liam and his dad, Sam Fisher, spotted a long, gray-white bone sticking out of the ground. “Dad asked, ‘What is this?’ and Jessin said, ‘That’s a dinosaur.’” Sam Fisher sent a photo of the bone to Dr. Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who confirmed that it was indeed a dinosaur bone. Initially, Dr. Lyson thought the bone belonged to a duckbill dinosaur, a more common species. However, when the excavation began in 2023, Jessin and Dr. Lyson found a T. rex tooth, followed by three more teeth attached to a jaw.
Researchers estimate that the T. rex was about 7.6 m long and 3 m tall, weighing around 1,600 kg, or about two-thirds the size of a fully grown adult. The dinosaur was likely between 13 and 15 years old when it died roughly 67 million years ago.
Dr. Lyson said that juvenile T. rex specimens are extremely rare and that this discovery is significant because it may help scientists understand how the “king of dinosaurs” grew up. The boys affectionately named the young dinosaur “The Brothers.” It went on display at the Denver museum on June 21, 2024. The exhibit, entitled “Discovering Teen Rex,” includes a documentary chronicling the boys’ remarkable discovery.
