Work on another prime Hill County dinosaur fossil wrapping up

Paleontologists digging 26 miles north of Rudyard found fossil remains of what could be a new species of the armored ankylosaurus dinosaur family.

Last week, the five paleontologists excavating on Dan and Lila Redding's property unearthed the jackpot of skeletons - the skull, upping the value of the discovery exponentially. The skull has been wrapped and plastered to be sent to the Dickinson Museum Center in Dickinson, North Dakota, which will be followed by the rest of the skeleton once it is unearthed.

"It's pretty special, when you find the head so early," Denver Fowler, paleontology curator at the Dickinson Museum Center, said Friday.

Skeletons within a family can be very similar, but the skull distinguishes the species, Fowler said.

The Reddings' 2,500 acres of badlands has been the excavation site for paleontology students and professors from all over the world for more than three decades. The Reddings were presented with the international Morris Skinner Award at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 76th annual meeting in Salt Lake City in October for their contribution in preserving the area and allowing excavations.

"We got dinosaurs all over the place here," Lila Redding said Friday.

"Finding dinosaur bones here," paleontology professor Liz Freedman-Fowler said, "is easy. But the armored dinosaurs are much more rare, so we were very excited to find pieces of this. We've found bits and pieces before, but this site had several bones all together, so that meant there was good potential for more."

Fowler said the latest find began two years ago, when he was hosting a group of high-schoolers who were on a field trip in the coulee behind the Redding's home.

"We were looking for clam shells for another researcher and we got to the bottom here and I was saying, 'You don't really have to worry where you are until you find something,' and then we found something," Fowler said, laughing. "So we were really looking forward to coming back and seeing how much of this thing there might be."

The group came back hoping for a breakthrough find, and they seem to have found exactly that.

"And, very luckily, we got this skull almost immediately, and that's how you know whether it's a new species,"  Friedman-Fowler said.

The husband and wife paleontology duo described what the herbivore dinosaur was probably like.

"They're big, stout, stocky animals with pathetic little teeth, similar to armadillos," Freedman-Fowler said.

"They have a really wide rib cage," Fowler said. "They're slow, they're not winning any races. They have really beady eyes, they're bad-tempered. People think of them like a modern rhino - just stay out of their way."

Fowler said the dinosaur was most likely between 15 and 20 feet long.

The paleontologists said their plan to dig as much of the skeleton as possible this year, come back next year to unearth rest of it, and after it's all sent back to the museum and cleaned up, they will know if they have the entire skeleton.

Montana, Freedman-Fowler said, is a paleontologist's excavation dream.

"It's one of the best places in the world, because to find fossils you need the right age rocks, and they need to actually be exposed," she said. "A lot of Montana is this kind of badlands area where you have steep enough cliffs that the plants don't grow on them, and so you can actually see the bones coming out."

Fowler, who came from England to study at Montana State University, said he'd always had dreams of digging in Montana.

"My dad and I used to collect a lot of fossils in England," he said.  "We used to joke about being in the badlands of Montana."