Tyler Lyson has come to expect “finds” from his old high school buddy, Sam Fisher.
Now the Curator of Paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Lyson has spent time in the Badlands of North Dakota, where Fisher and his family reside. It's an area rich with prehistoric potential.
“It's one of the best places in the world to find dinosaur fossils,” Lyson said.
And it’s certainly not uncommon for Fisher to go out hiking and digging and poking around for bones, usually with his sons, Jessin and Liam, and his nephew, Kaiden Madsen, along for the ride — to the point that, chuckles Sam, “I’ve got Tyler on speed dial.”
As often as they traverse the target-rich environment, Lyson said he expected the group to come upon something someday.
But more often than not, he admitted, the group’s texts and photos, barely elicited more than a, “That’s nice.”
Finding something better than 'nice'
So when “the” moment finally came, in July of 2022, Lyson was this close to missing it. There was, to be sure, another picture — an adorable shot of Liam, all 3-feet-8 of him, cozied up alongside the leg of some prehistoric-looking creature that was just about as long as he was.
Even so, initially, Lyson’s thoughts were only slightly more elevated than “nice.”
“They'd been looking for fossils for a long time, so I was just so happy for the family that they'd made this discovery,” he said. “And then when I started looking at the photos, I thought it was a duckbill, just based on the knee joint that was exposed that they found, it looked like a duckbill.”
But as he looked closer, Lyson realized what he was really looking at.
The fossil Fisher and the kids had unearthed wasn’t a duckbill or even a triceratops, but something else entirely — a Tyrannosaurus rex. And not just any T-rex, but a kid-sized version of the creature.
Which made the find a pretty big bang.
“Well, this story of discovery, a find like this of these kids and their dad going out looking for fossils and finding one, I mean, I think it's one in a couple billion,” Lyson said. “If you look at it from a scientific point of view, there's about over 100 T-Rex specimens known, but most of those are only known based on a handful of bones.”
“And so there's only about 20 or 30 that are, say 25 percent or more complete. And of those, there's only five or six that are juveniles. So finding a juvenile tyrannosaurus is exceedingly rare. And then to have it be found by these kids I think is just incredible.”
Unearthing 'The Brother'
Needless to say, the discovery set off a flurry of activity.
The fossil was on grounds belonging to the Bureau of Land Management, which meant that the excavation could only be done with a permit and by someone who’s part of a federal depository. Like, say, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Once acquired, last summer Lyson led a team that unearthed the dinosaur, which the boys named “The Brother.”
“Because me and Justin are brothers and (Kaiden) feels like a brother to us,” Liam said, “And the T-Rex is a brother to us.”
Not only were they part of the team, the trio had featured roles in a new documentary, “T-Rex,” which is being shown at the museum’s Infinity Theater.
On Friday, the boys were also front and center at a press conference heralding the find.
A temporary exhibit, “Discovering Teen Rex,” is now open, allowing the public to watch as the fossil is prepped in real-time.
The next adventure
As the Fishers took in the magnitude of what had been accomplished by their kids, mom Danielle shed a tear.
“She’s a natural bawler,” Jessin joked. “She saw that sign out front and just started crying.”
“Two years ago when they thought they found a dinosaur, I was like, ‘Okay, cool, whatever,’” Danielle said. “But then when they said it was a T-Rex, I had to walk off because I started bawling.”
“Now, when they’re going hiking ... I’m like, ‘Let’s go — I want to be there for the next one.’”
But according to Liam, the next time won’t be nearly as good as the first time.
“I think my mom was crying because it was bittersweet for her; she was happy and sad," he said. "She was happy that we found it but she was sad because it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us.”
“But that’s because we’re kids; when we get older, we’re going to find more and more and more of them. And we know we're going to put them in this museum — exactly in this place.”
