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Triceratops skull found in Colorado during construction work

By Brittany Roston/

Construction workers in Colorado have just made an incredible discovery: a triceratops skeleton including a skull, making it only the third triceratops skull discovered in the part of Colorado known as the Front Range. The skull and skeleton were buried for somewhere around 66 million years; the entire fossil hasn't yet been unearthed, but researchers are already excited.

The fossil was found during the construction of a public safety building in the Colorado city of Thornton late last week. Construction workers spotted the dinosaur remains while removing ground material using a skid loader. Recognizing that the objects they were seeing could possibly being fossils, they stopped work and notified the proper authorities.

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science's dinosaur curator Joe Sertich has said that crews working on removing the bones have thus far identified a shoulder blade and, most importantly, a horn. The presence of the horn means the construction crew stumbled upon a skull, not just a random leg bone, making this an important find that thankfully avoided destruction by construction machinery.

The City of Thornton recently shared some pictures of the digging crew via its Twitter page. In an official statement on the city's website, officials explain that museum scientists are now on site at the location and that construction crews have stopped their work for now. In addition to extracting these triceratops bones, the crew will also search the area for any other bones that may have been fossilized in the region. Security is present at the site to ensure no one messes with the discovery.

The removal, cleaning and preservation process will no doubt take a significant amount of time, but the bones will eventually be housed in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. No one should attempt to visit the site as they will be turned away by security; the city says you can't see the fossils from the road.

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