Adrianna Nine
2024-03-05 08:00:00
www.extremetech.com
One of the many bones comprising Boschetto’s discovery.
Credit: Damien Boschetto/ACAP
A man was walking his dog in Hérault, France a couple of years ago when he stumbled upon the finding of a lifetime: a near-complete dinosaur skeleton. Having been kept under wraps since then to avoid meddling from vandals, researchers are readying the 30-foot-long fossil for an exhibit at Musée de Cruzy, a French museum.
Damien Boschetto, a 25-year-old resident of Montouliers, spotted a bit of exposed bone during an otherwise regular walk in 2022. A landslide had reportedly swept sediment away from the edge of a cliff, revealing bone embedded in the terrain. Boschetto immediately reported the finding to the Cultural, Archaeological, and Paleontological Association (ACAP) in Cruzy, a nearby township.
Excavations revealed that Boschetto had spotted the pelvic bone of a titanosaur, a long-necked, herbivorous quadruped thought to have roamed Earth more than 66 million years ago. ACAP paleontologists found that the fossilized skeleton was about 70% complete and stretched 30 feet across. The organization elected to keep the discovery under wraps to protect it from vandalism. For the next two years, they conducted several 10-day excavation campaigns involving local students and early-career scientists.
The skeleton of a patagotitan, a type of titanosaur, on display at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
Credit: Zissoudisctrucker/Wikimedia Commons
ACAP has since extracted the fossil from the ground and transported it to the laboratory at Musée de Cruzy. There, paleontologists will study and inventory the bones before preparing them for display. It’s currently unclear when the public will be able to visit Boschetto’s discovery at the museum.
A titanosaur fossil found in this particular region of France shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Hérault, a part of Occitanie that encompasses Boschetto’s township and Cruzy, is home to several banner Upper Cretaceous discoveries from just the last three decades. But many of the fossils found in Hérault have been trace fossils, signs that a particular animal once lived there—not pieces of the animal itself. Researchers from the University of Burgundy Franche-Comté found sauropod footprints on the roof of a cave there in 2020; another group of researchers found preserved dinosaur eggs in Mèze, another Hérault commune, in 1996. This is the first time in several years that an articulated dinosaur skeleton has been found in the region.
Boschetto studied paleontology as an undergrad and has spent the last few years volunteering at Musée de Cruzy. According to the Washington Post, his discovery prompted him to leave his job in the energy sector and return to paleontology as a career path. He’s now helping ACAP maintain its fossil collections.