5-year-old finds rare dinosaur bones near shopping center

Dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes, and so do Dino-diggers.

“Over the past few years, we’ve found a lot of really amazing things, but this is by far the most awesome thing we’ve found.”

Dallas zoo keeper Tim Brys and his son Wiley hit the Jurassic jackpot while digging around a Mansfield, Texas, shopping center development.

Wiley, who is just five-years-old, found something 100 million years in the making.

“He walked up here a head of me here and came back with a piece of bone. It was a pretty good size. I knew it was something interesting,” Brys said.

That interesting thing is what SMU paleontologists call a Nodosaur, a dinosaur probably as large as a horse, covered in armored plates.

Now the bones are headed to SMU to be examined.

“I don’t think it has hit either one of us just how amazing this is. I know it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity a lot of people never find something like this.” Brys said.

The folks at SMU say a find like this is extremely rare, and for a five-year-old kid to have found it, may be more rare than the Dino itself.

“Wiley will start out as a young paleontologist,” SMU Professor Lewis Jacobs said, “But he’ll grow up something spectacular even if its not a paleontologist.”