New Dinosaur Found In Missouri, Field Museum Helps With Dig

MISSOURI — Missouri isn't known for dinosaurs — only a handful of fossils have ever been discovered in the Show-Me State — but paleontologists say they have unearthed four new skeletons at a site in Bollinger County that may re-write the natural history of the region.

The discovery includes three adult specimens and one juvenile Parrosaurus missouriensis, a previously misidentified dinosaur that has since been reclassified. The 3-4 ton, 10-foot-tall, 30-foot-long duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs, were about the size of modern elephants. They had thousands of small, serrated teeth for chomping through thick vegetation and spiked thumbs for mating, self-defense or both.

Though the first specimen was discovered way back in the 1940s, scientists initially thought it was a long-necked dinosaur called a sauropod. It was reclassified as a hadrosaur called Parrosaurus missouriensis in late 1945, then changed to Hypsibema missouriensis in 1979, and made the Missouri state dinosaur under that name in 2004.

Only in 2018 did paleontologists decide the Parrosaurus represented its own genus after all, changing the name back to Parrosaurus missouriensis.

“It wasn’t clear what this thing was all the way up until recently,” Paleontologist Guy Darrough told the Kansas City Star.

Calling the find a "big, big deal," he compared it to "finding King Tut's treasure in Missouri."

Darrough discovered the juvenile skeleton in 2017 and reached out to the Chicago Field Museum, which began more extensive excavations at the site.

“This is in fact a remarkable site in one of the best dinosaur locals east of the Great Plains,” the Field Museum's curator of dinosaurs, Pete Makovicky, told WGN.

Other finds to come from the site include prehistoric turtle skeletons and a tyrannosaurus tooth.

“Every time they’ve dug, they’ve found all kinds of neat stuff,” Darrough said, according to the Star.

In the 1940s, the original owners of the site — the Chronister family — began digging a cistern near their farmhouse. Little did they know, they were about to uncover the first dinosaur fossils ever found in Missouri.

“Literally they dug a hole behind their house and [pieces of] a dinosaur popped out," Makovicky told the Star. "That’s how this whole thing started."

Because of the state's wet climate and soft soil, dinosaur bones are often damaged by erosion before they can be found. Paleontologists say the new Parrosaurs are a significant find because they're among only a handful of dinosaurs we know about that lived on the east coast of a massive inland sea that once divided the continent.

The Chronisters reported their find to the Missouri Geological Survey, who, in turn, told the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

"The United States National Museum has come into possession of a fragmentary dinosaur specimen of more than ordinary interest in being the first of the great group of reptiles to be discovered in the state of Missouri," wrote paleontologist Charles W. Gilmore in 1945.

According to a Journal of Paleontology article by Gilmore and Missouri geologist Dan R. Stewart, "The dinosaur bones were found embedded in a black plastic clay, which was encountered at a depth of 8 feet in a shallow well dug at the farmhouse of Mrs. Lulu Chronsiter."

Stewart said the find dated from the upper cretaceous, about 66 to 100 million years ago.

After the initial find, scientists seemed to lose interest until Missouri paleontologists bought the property from the Chronisters in the 1980s.

Despite wet clay making excavations difficult, paleontologists say the site may continue to turn up interesting finds for years to come.