Five-Year-Old Discovers Rare Dinosaur Fossil From Jurassic Period

Last September, when five-year-old Wylie Brys set out on a leisurely expedition with his dad to find fish vertebrae, little did he know that he'll discover a 100 million-year-old dinosaur fossil.   

The boy's father, Tim Brys, a Dallas zookeeper, had zeroed down on the construction site next to a nearby grocery store in Texas, US because of the good chances of unearthing hidden fossils there. "The whole area was covered in water millions of years ago," Tim told NBC DFW.

When Wylie dug out the ancient fossil, dad Tim thought it was a turtle, but the pair continued to dig to ascertain that possibility. They soon knew the remnants belonged to a bigger creature.

Scientists at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas took over from the father-son duo last Friday and now say that the fossil could be of Nodosaur, a herbivorous land-dwelling dinosaur.

"My dad told me it was a turtle, but now he's telling me it's a dinosaur," an exhilarated Wylie said on Tuesday to the Dallas Morning News.

The bones, which are now wrapped in plaster, are being taken to the SMU lab for further study.