Dinosaur hunter, Wylie Brys
Last week, Dallas News reported that Wylie Brys, son of Tim Vrys—a Dallas Zookeeper—had indeed discovered
a real dinosaur fossil behind the Mansfield mall.
Tim Brys, who works at the Dallas Zoo, found the 100 million-year-old fossil with his son Wylie on a patch of land behind a grocery store at Matlock Road and Debbie Lane. At the time, the zookeeper didn’t know what his boy had found.
“My dad told me it was a turtle,” Wylie said Tuesday at the site of his discovery. “But now he’s telling me it’s a dinosaur.”
This lucky duck is living
my childhood dream! The find happened back in September but it took over half a year for the right permits to be acquired in order to dig up the bones.
This week, scientists from Southern Methodist University helped extract the fossil and believe it could be that of a land-dwelling nodosaur, a pony-sized creature.
SMU paleontologist Michael Polcyn has found more fossilised bones at the site from the nodosaur: a femur and what could be its toes.
Nodosaurus: that model doesn't look "pony-sized" at all
How cool is that?
While the fossils were found in September, it took over seven months to get the necessary permits to dig up the bones, with the Dallas Zoo helping handle some of the paperwork. Once they had permission, the scientists started digging Friday. [...]
Polcyn [paleontologist] said that if the father and son hadn’t made the discovery, this dinosaur may have never been found.
“It would have been buried and never been discovered in our lifetime,” Polcyn said.