College student uncovers 65-million-year-old triceratops skull in North Dakota

It was the discovery he'd always dreamed of making.

In June, 23-year-old University of California Merced student Harrison Duran was working at a dig site in the North Dakota Badlands when, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a piece of petrified wood. He was there with Michael Kjelland, an excavator and professor at Mayville State University, and together they started digging. What Duran initially thought was a piece of wood turned out to be a 65-million-year-old dinosaur fossil.

Duran discovered the partial skull of a triceratops, which has been named Alice after the woman who owned the land where it was found. After spending about a week carefully removing the skull from the ground, they used a special glue to solidify the mineralized bones, the Los Angeles Times reports. From there, the fossil was covered in foil and plaster and wrapped in a foam mattress for protection.

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Duran grew up going to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and always imagined what it would be like to find a fossil. "It's almost like dinosaurs have a mythos about them," he told the Times. "They're seen as mythological beasts, so it's amazing to actually discover one, to remember that they were living, breathing animals at one point." Catherine Garcia