High School Student Discovers Baby Dinosaur Skeleton in National Monument

By Marina Koren
Here's another reason to avoid closing down national parks and monuments: They're teeming with dinosaur fossils, and some of them are right on the surface, ready to be found.

In 2009, high school student Kevin Terris was trekking through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah when something at his feet caught his eye. "At first I was interested in seeing what the initial piece of bone sticking out of the rock was," Terris told scientists. "When we exposed the skull, I was ecstatic!"

Terris had stumbled upon a nearly complete skeleton of a baby Parasaurolophus, a plant-eating dinosaur that roamed western North America around 75 million years ago. The discovery, announced Tuesday by Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California, is the youngest and most complete fossil skeleton on record for this species of dinosaur.

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http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/high-school-student-discovers-baby-dinosaur-skeleton-in-national-monument-20131022