Think that you don't have what it takes to start a career in paleontology, even though your fascination with dinosaurs never ends? Well never fear, news this week reveals that you're never too old, or too young, to start on the hunt for dinosaurs. And 4-year-old Wylie Brys, of Mansfield, Texas, is proving this sentiment true.
Now, normal 4-year-olds may be playing with imaginary monsters or friends that they believe to be millions of years old, but Wylie knows how to do it right. See, he discovered a new friend earlier this week when he came across a strange artifact outside a new shopping center development in the suburbs of Dallas. And though it may have been quite by accident, Wylie's new friend is the fossil of a 100 million-year-old dinosaur known as a Nodosaur, whose remains are actually quite rare.
Wylie's father, Tim Brys a zookeeper at the Dallas Zoo originally thought that the remains may have come from a turtle, but when his son and some researchers from Southern Methodist University revealed the true nature of Wylie's nodosaur, they quickly started the paperwork to excavate the rest of the site.
Wylie's dinosaur friend has been carefully wrapped in burlap an plaster, and is awaiting shipment to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where the fossils will be cleaned and re-assembled. So though he may not be able to play with him or see him in a museum just yet, one day soon Wylie may have the rights to name his prehistoric friend-just hopefully something not from the "The Land Before Time".
