In the summer of 2009, Kevin Terris, a then newly graduated high school senior, made an amazing discovery.
Terris was on an annual summer dig in Utah with fellow students from the Webb Schools in Claremont, Calif., and professional paleontologists from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, when he stumbled upon a mushroom-shaped rock sticking out of the ground.
"I sort of popped under it and saw a bit of bone sticking out," says Terris, now a Montana State University paleontology student, according to US News & World Report.
It turns out that Terris discovered the remains of a 1-year-old duck-billed dinosaur called a Parasaurolophus that was stuck under a rock for 75 million years.
"It's important as the youngest, the smallest and also the most complete skeleton known for Parasaurolophus," said Andrew Farke, curator of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, on the campus of the Webb Schools in Claremont, according to the LA Times. "The fossil tells us a whole lot that we didn't know before about how these things evolved and grew their really bizarre headgear."
"Initially, it didn't look like too much. It looked like a rib, and ribs don't hold a whole lot of scientific value. ... But then as we were walking away, we flipped over a bit of loose rock on the other end and found this skull just sitting there."
On second look, the "ribs" turned out to be toe bones. "If we had the toe bones on one end and the skull on the other, we figured the whole skeleton would be there in between."
It took nearly three years to find out. Farke and the students returned the next year to hammer down the boulder to about the size of a small refrigerator, so it could be swaddled in plaster and burlap and air-lifted nine miles to the nearest highway, and trucked to Claremont.
Terris, who is now 22 years old, went on to Montana State, but Farke kept him informed of progress as researchers chipped away at the rock.
"With pretty much every update that Dr. Farke sent me it just got better and better," Terris said. "It was like living the dream; like, wow, this is every paleontologist's dream."
An analysis of the fossil was published online Tuesday in the open-access journal PeerJ. Farke also has created a Dinosaur Joe Web page and made images of the specimen public.
During its short lifetime, the Parasuarolophus probably wandered the flood plains of an island continent known as Laramidia, and grew to about 6 feet - about a fourth the size of an adult Parasaurolophus.