IN 2021, JONATHAN CHARPENTIER WAS WALKING IN A FIELD BEHIND his grandparents’ home in south Boulder when he spotted what appeared to be an especially shiny rock. Curious, the then 14-year-old pocketed it. Later, after he washed off the dirt, he compared the serrations on the curved mass to images of fossilized dinosaur teeth online; it looked enough like what he was seeing for him to email a photo to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS).
Charpentier didn’t have to wait long for an answer. “They told me it was definitely a T. rex tooth,” he says. Although the original is now in the museum’s collection, he has a cast of the relic—and a story that should inspire dinosaurloving Coloradans of all ages to look for signs of the creatures that roamed the Earth some 245 million to 66 million years ago. “It’s pretty crazy,” Charpentier says, “that you can find stuff like that right outside your house.”
Stumbling upon an exposed Tyrannosaurus rex chomper may be a rare occurrence, but uncovering fossils in the West isn’t. The dinosaur bone rush began in America in the 1870s, and ever since then, people have been pulling plant and animal remains from Colorado’s layers of sediment, which were conveniently uplifted during the formation of the Rocky Mountains. Unobscured by water or thick vegetation, local rock—from early quarries around Morrison and Cañon City to current dig sites in eastern Colorado’s Comanche National Grasslands and Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs—has revealed countless discoveries that add to our understanding of ecosystems and evolution in the Mesozoic Era and beyond.
In recognition of the scientific value of that knowledge, in 2009, Congress passed the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act, which provided a framework and (some) funding for the protection of fossils on public lands. In the 1980s and ’90s, “you would come across pits where people had dug things out,” says Denver-based U.S. Forest Service national paleontologist Bruce Schumacher, one of just three paleontologists tasked with overseeing the Department of Agriculture–run agency’s 193 million acres, from Alaska to Florida. Even with official staff spread that thin, however, illegal pillaging by commercial collectors today is rare. The Forest Service credits the increased field presence of research teams—who hold permits issued by Schumacher and his counterparts at other federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management—for the success of its fossil conservation efforts.
In Colorado, these legitimate fossil hunters are often groups of volunteers led by scientists from local organizations such as the DMNS. They mostly dig on remote public lands, but our fossil-friendly conditions mean that new construction in urban areas tends to turn up bones, too. “We’re always waiting for that phone call, because it is going to come every few years. The last one was 2019,” says Tyler Lyson, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the DMNS, referencing a triceratops that was uncovered in Highlands Ranch. “Usually, we get the picture and we say, ‘Well, it’s just a rock. It’s a cool rock. Keep the rock, treasure that rock.’ But then, every now and again, it’s something really, really cool.”
There are perhaps no two things more universally beloved by kids than dinosaurs and poop. So it makes sense that the work of Karen Chin, associate professor and curator of paleontology at
