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Pipeline Excavations Accidentally Uncover Dinosaur
Professional paleontologists aren’t the only people to find dinosaurs. In addition to discoveries made by amateurs, sometimes the especially lucky stumble across dinosaurs entirely by accident. That’s what happened this week when a Tourmaline Oil Corp. backhoe operator working in Alberta, Canada accidentally snapped off part of a dinosaur’s tail.
The CBC story has a nice shot of the dinosaur’s impressive back half. Based on the anatomy of the vertebrae and the ossified tendons, the mostly-complete tail looks to be part of a hadrosaur. But how big was this dinosaur, and what species does this fossil posterior belong to?
Early reports erroneously stated that the dinosaur was 30 meters long, and