Looking for an oil pipeline in Canada, a backhoe, hit an ancient dinosaur fossil this week CNN reported Thursday.
A construction worker discovered the find after he dropped the equipment's shovel directly on top of the 35-foot dinosaur's tail which was inside a rock near a site in the town of Spirit River. He stopped the backhoe from going any further when he saw the dinosaur was falling apart.
"You handle it carefully, or it's just going to shatter," paleontologist Matthew Vavrek told CNN. "As we walked around it, we saw this whole part of a tail of a dinosaur. To see something like that is pretty incredible."
Vavrel was called in after construction workers searched for someone who knew about dinosaurs. According to CNN, paleontologists usually examine pieces that are jumbled up, broken apart, crushed and spread out over a large area,
"The last time I've seen something like that was in a museum," Vavrek said. "I've never found something like this before."
Workers from the Tourmaline Oil Corp used machinery to assist Vavrek and his team to carefully remove the fossil in a process that could take weeks or months depending on the weather. If the dinosaur freezes into the ground, the process could drag on for years. Workers are also in a rush to finish removing the fossil in time for Alberta' snowfall of the season, which usually dumps a lot on the area.
"We don't know for sure that the rest of the animal is there," Vavrek told CNN. "Sometimes, all you get is what you see. If it turns out to be something new, never found before,it would take even longer."
To remove the fossil, workers are going to cart it off to be cleaned and prepared to be studied and identified.
