11-Year-Old's Fossil Find 'Blew All of Our Minds'

An 11-year-old's casual rock hunt in Wyoming ended with a big fossil find. While searching for quartz crystals and other rocks on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in southwest Wyoming with his grandparents in September, Touren Pope spotted what experts now say is a 48-million-year old turtle specimen, nearly complete. Touren tells Wyoming Public Media that he initially wanted to chuck the apparent hunk of rock before giving it a closer look. At first, the group wasn't entirely sure what Touren had found, but the boy's mother, amateur geologist Tessa Patterson, agreed it looked special. "It blew all of our minds," she tells WPM.

Though Touren wanted to dig up the fossil straight away, the family instead contacted the BLM, as required for discoveries on public land. Paleontology staff from the Rock Springs Field Office quickly determined the find was a well-preserved softshell turtle fossil that had rested in what was once an ancient lake surrounded by a tropical floodplain home to turtles, crocodiles, and fish, per People. JP Cavigelli of the Tate Geological Museum said the animal would be recognizable to anyone familiar with modern softshell turtles, and archaeologist Craig Thomas noted the fossil was found just in time, before surface exposure could destroy it, per WPM.

Touren was invited to help with the eventual excavation. "We basically just pulled it out and then carried it" some distance to a truck, he tells Your Wyoming Link. "Then we had lunch—best part." He was even given the chance to name the specimen, choosing "Little Timmy." In a statement, the BLM credited his sharp eye and decision to report the fossil with preserving a piece of Wyoming's paleontological record and underscored how members of the public can aid scientific work on public lands. Little Timmy is now housed at the Tate Geological Museum, available for researchers and visitors alike.