It seemed like a typical day for 25-year-old Damien Boschetto, who was out walking his dog in the peaceful area of Montouliers, Hérault, France. But it’s not every day that you find a 70-million-year-old piece of history.
This occurred approximately two years ago, shortly after a recent landslide. The landslide had revealed the side of a cliff where Boschetto, an inexperienced person who studies old life forms, noticed big bones. His trained eye quickly allowed him to determine that these were dinosaur fossils. After a few days of digging with experts from a local museum, the researchers realized that these were the remains of a Titanosaur, one of the largest dinosaurs to have ever walked on Earth.
The discovery of a lifetime
To make matters even more interesting, when the remains were arranged and put together, they formed a nearly complete 30-foot-long skeleton. It’s exceedingly rare to find a dinosaur skeleton so well preserved and complete.
Boschetto reported his findings to a local association dedicated to cultural, archaeological, and paleontological pursuits. Experts from the association determined the fossil to be approximately 70 million years old, providing a rare look into the life of titanosaurs. These plant-eating behemoths, known for their elongated necks, roamed the earth from about 150 to 66 million years ago. Every continent was inhabited with their massive presence.
In spite of the many fossils and tens of thousands of diggings over the years, finding an almost complete dinosaur skeleton remains an extraordinary rarity. To put it into perspective, a previous exploration highlighted that, despite an estimated 1.7 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes once living in the Cretaceous period, paleontologists have uncovered remains of fewer than 100 individuals. And most of these T. rexes are known from partial remains.
A find worth protecting
The most complete T. rex is a specimen called Sue at display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. About 90 percent of its skeleton has been preserved. The titanosaur discovered by Boschetto is about 70 percent complete. Currently, there’s no word on which particular type of titanosaur we’re talking about here. But we’ll likely know more once the findings are formalized in a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
“The recent discovery of a new deposit in the neighboring town of Montouliers provides us with an assemblage of dinosaur skeletons in almost complete anatomical connections (the bones of the animal are still articulated to each other). This is a very rare and exceptional discovery in France and Europe,” Boschetto told Newsweek.
The finding has been kept a secret until now to protect the site from vandals. The dinosaur will be displayed at the Cruzy Museum soon. As for Boschetto, he recently left his job in the energy industry to pursue a master’s degree in paleontology. It seems he won’t be a beginner for much longer.
