60 years later, once again a discovery is made at the same site in Missouri

The first tracings of dinosaurs in Missouri were found in the 1940s on the Chronister family’s property when they were digging a well. Nearly 60 years later, another set of fossils from the same species were uncovered about 50 feet away.

After comparing and matching the tail vertebrates of these discoveries, paleontologists described them as “relatively primitive” duck-billed dinosaurs. The specimen of the state dinosaur of Missouri, named Parrosaurus missouriensis, was excavated after a years-long process that began in 2017, Chronister site curator Peter Makovicky said. Makovicky is a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Minnesota.

“Whenever you find a locality in the Midwest or in Eastern North America, where you’re getting multiple dinosaur skeletons coming out of one site, it’s really a windfall with almost no parallels,” he said.

Fossils in Missouri are rare — the Chronister site, a couple of dozen acres of woodland located near Bollinger County in Missouri, is the only place fossils have been found in Missouri, according to Erika Woehlk, a visual materials archivist at the Missouri State Archives. Most dinosaurs in the United States have been found in the West.

“No one thought that there were any dinosaurs in Missouri. It’s just unheard of to find dinosaur fossils in this part of the country,” said Abigail Kern, office manager for the Sainte Genevieve Museum Learning Center in Missouri.

But this site is rich.

Source: Agencies