[ad_1]
Damien Boschetto made the discovery in the south of France in 2022.
A man who walked his dog in France two years ago made a surprising discovery that he has kept secret until now.
In 2022, Damien Boschetto stumbled upon a huge 70-million-year-old fossil that turned out to be a nearly complete skeleton of a long-necked titanosaur, he told ABC News.
Boschetto, now 25, said the unexpected discovery was made in the woods of Montouliers, near his home in Cruzy, a town in southern France.
“The territory around Cruzy is rich in fossils of dinosaurs and other species that lived at the same time,” Boschetto told ABC News in a translated statement. “For 28 years, Cruzy has been supplying and building one of the largest collections of dinosaur fossils from the Late Cretaceous in France.”
Titanosaurs, members of the sauropod dinosaur family, roamed the Earth from the Late Jurassic – 163.5 million to 145 million years ago – until the end of the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. , according to British.
Long-necked dinosaurs are the largest known land animals, Britannica reports, adding that some titanosaurs grew to the size of modern whales. Its fossils, which include 40 different species, have been found on every continent except Antarctica, according to Britannica.
Boschetto, who has a “self-taught passion” for paleontology, discovered the exposed bone fossils, leading to the excavation of a 30-foot-long, 70% complete fossilized titanosaur.
“It happened one morning like any other, during a walk,” Boschetto told a local. FranceBleu in February. “While I was walking the dog, a landslide on the edge of the cliff exposed the bones of several skeletons.”
“They were fallen bones, therefore isolated. After a few days of excavations we realized that they were connected bones,” said Boschetto.
Boschetto, along with members of the Cruzy Museum’s Archaeological and Paleontological Cultural Association (ACAP), kept the findings secret to protect the paleontological site while they excavated the enormous skeleton.
“During the extraction, we were in sandstone. It is an extremely hard sediment,” Boschetto said, adding that he and ACAP members feared the site “would be looted and damaged by people who don’t know.”
Boschetto hopes people will visit the Cruzy Museum to see the titanosaur skeleton now that the fossil has been excavated and protected for study. “It’s an iconic piece for the general public to be able to admire a dinosaur in an anatomical connection like that,” he said.
Since his discovery two years ago, Boschetto said he left his job in the energy sector and now hopes to pursue a master’s degree in paleontology to continue his work at Cruzy.
Francis Fage, founder of the Cruzy Museum, told FranceBleu that Boschetto’s exceptional discovery shows that he has an “eye” for dinosaur research.
“It’s very rare to find this, you had to be careful,” Fage said of Damien. “There are some who have passed by for 30 years and have not seen this place.”