A man walking his dog in 2022 came across nearly fully intact dinosaur bones protruding out from a cliff in the French town of Montouliers, CBS News reported Wednesday.
Damien Boschetto happened to be a member of the Association of Culture, Archeology and Paleontology (ACAP) and kept the find secret to protect the site and to “avoid damage during the extraction of the largest parts [of the dinosaur remains]”, CBS News noted.
A man walking his dog stumbled upon dinosaur bones. A nearly fully-intact titanosaurus skeleton was unearthed. https://t.co/NjqoFuYF82
— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 7, 2024
Boschetto and ACAP volunteers would set up many 10-day excavation sessions during the 2-year period when the find was kept hidden from the public, the outlet reported. The excavations yielded the rare complete remains of a titanosaurus, the outlet noted. Titanosaurus is a diverse group of extinct dinosaurs, with some of the species being the largest land-walking animals known to scientists, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Boschetto’s find was around 10 meters long, CBS News noted.
“This is what makes it an interesting deposit from a scientific point of view,” Boschetto wrote to CBS. “From a museography point of view, it will make it possible to present to the general public animals almost complete in anatomical positions, which is something great,” he added. (RELATED: Scientists Uncover Ancient ‘Nightmarish’ Sea Monster Fossils)
The remains are stored and exhibited in the Cruzy Museum and will, according to Boschetto, “enable us to contribute to the expansion of the museum,” CBS News reported. The Cruzy Museum is a French institution dedicated to “[p]aleontological, archaeological and local history” according to their website.