Clean Out Your Cabinets—there May Be Dinosaurs In There!

My Top 3

Three unrelated stories, or a frightening pattern?

A geology student in England discovered a new dinosaur species —
in a museum storeroom. The fossil had been collected in 1894 but never fully studied.

A scientists in Germany, looking through a museum’s fossil collections, stumbled across a rock slab that captured a shark eating an amphibian, while the amphibian was in the act of eating a fish. Again, the fossil had been lying in a museum cabinet for years before a researcher stumbled across it and recognized its meaning.

Meanwhile, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto rediscovered an 80-foot dinosaur skeleton they forgot they had. A nearly-complete skeleton of a Borosaurus arrived in 1962. But because the museum didn’t have enough space to display it, the bones went into storage, spread over many cabinets until workers lost track of what was where. An employee, looking for skeletons to borrow from other museums, ran across an old newspaper clipping describing the fossil.

So, when your Mom tells you to keep your room clean, there’s a reason – she doesn’t want you to lose any dinosaurs!