NPR has a story about hunting dinosaurs in the Badlands of North Dakota. The post describes the adventures of college student Harrison Duran. He grew up visiting the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and dreamed of finding dinosaurs. This year, he participated in a paleontology dig with Michael Kjelland, a biology professor at Mayville State University of North Dakota. This summer he is working as an intern at Kjelland’s nonprofit group, Fossil Excavators. The result is a partial Triceratops skull. Follow your dreams, they can come true!
“I’m just feeling absolute – it’s almost like disbelief at first, but absolute just joy, excitement and it’s a very fulfilling feeling,” Duran tells NPR, about the moment the team made the find. “It’s almost like a spiritual moment in a way because I’ve been so passionate about this topic.”
After finding leaf fossils embedded in sandstone, the excavators continued forward and noticed the triceratops horn sticking out above the ground.
The dinosaur skull, which Kjelland and Duran named Alice, will be prepared for display after the specimen is solidified. Duran plans to have a mold exhibited at his school, where he is entering the fifth year of a 4+1 program in biology.
Duran’s dinosaur passion is prehistoric. He can’t remember the moment he first became infatuated.
“Since I was an infant I’ve always been so fascinated with a bunch of titans of these lost worlds,” Duran says.
As a freshman biology student, he took a course on the History of Dinosaurs with Justin Yeakel.
“He was just one of the most curious students in the class,” Yeakel says. “He probably knew about as much as I did about dinosaurs and would always ask really good questions.”
Duran plans to continue on with his biology degree and keep going on expeditions with his fossil-hunting mentor Kjelland. He hopes that the 65-million-year-old skull will stimulate interest in the land before time and the world of nature.
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