ST. LOUIS — In the early 1940s, farmers digging a well in Bollinger County, about 100 miles south of St. Louis, made an unexpected discovery: tail bones from a long lost dinosaur. Now, paleontologists say they know what the rest of it looks like.
A team from Chicago's Field Museum recently finished excavating what experts say is the fullest skeleton yet of a Parrosaurus missouriensis, a 30-foot-long, 3-ton plant-eater that roamed the area tens of millions of years ago when the state was on the eastern shore of a sea cleaving North America in two.
The operation marks a turning point in an 80-year effort to understand a rare patch of Cretaceous Period rock east of the Great Plains, where much from the time of the dinosaurs has been weathered away. It sets the record straight on a creature celebrated as Missouri's state dinosaur, gives scientists tools to discover more about the environment then — and has paleontologists hopeful they're just scratching the surface.
