Guy Darrough calls Missouri “Dinosaur Country”. The hobby fossil hunter, from eastern Missouri’s Cadet, has a long list of different fossil finds in the Show Me State, including parts of the skull and jaw of a 30-foot-long juvenile dinosaur.
“I could tell these teeth were close to a dinosaur called an iguanodon – a very famous dinosaur,” he said.
He has also found the skeleton of a rare duck-billed dinosaur excavated earlier this year. The fossil turns out to be Missouri state dinosaur. The formal name of creature is Parrosaurus Missouriensis.
The 30-foot-long plant eater roamed the Earth about 77 million years ago. It is estimated to have had about one-thousand teeth and weighed three to four tons.
Parrosaurus remains have not been found anywhere else in the country.
Darrough thinks he has just scratched the surface in his dinosaur fossil discoveries in southeast Missouri.
“After we moved those bones, we could see that there’s another huge tail going off in one direction. There’s a leg with some gigantic toe bones in another direction, so there’s way more dinosaurs down there,” he said. “Who knows what we are going to find down there, really.”
He said scientists from the Field Museum in Chicago plan to return next Spring to continue digging.
“Most of the dinosaur age sediment rock in Missouri has been weathered away and the only reason that we’re finding dinosaurs where we’re finding them is because the ground dropped for some reason, maybe due to faulting,” said Darrough.
He found a tooth at the location that he said resembles one of a Tyrannosaurus.
“It may not be, but it is some kind of a big meat-eating theropod,” said Darrough.
The first time a dinosaur fossil was discovered in Missouri was in 1942 in Bollinger County. It was the tail bones of a brontosaurus.
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