When Trent Stanton set out on his hunting trip, dinosaurs weren't on his mind.
See how the discovery was made:
"I was out calling coyotes," said Stanton.
However, he ended up finding an animal gone long before any coyotes were around.
"I just saw something sticking up out of the ground, and I really didn't know what it was. I just thought it was a bone. So, I called a buddy of mine who came up, and we kind of dug on it for a minute and realized it was over our heads. So we called Clayton," Stanton continued.
Clayton Phipps is a local rancher and fossil hunter, described as a dinosaur cowboy. MTN News featured him last fall after he uncovered two dinosaurs in Phillips County.
When he made it to this new site, his jaw dropped.
"My cousins had reburied and covered it up till I could get there and when we took that tarp off, I was just blown away by the enormous size of the teeth on this guy,” said Phipps.
Phipps says the longest of those teeth is just shy of 15 inches.
"This tooth alone is a world-record tooth, but we also found this one at this site. It's two inches longer than this one that beat the world record. This is a monster T-Rex," Phipps said.
Phipps had some time to excavate in the fall, though he covered the site back up to preserve it over the colder months.
"We did a little bit of excavation this fall. We laid out a grid and mapped what we had and then we pulled it out of the ground. And then I reburied the site and covered it with lots of dirt, so hopefully frost doesn't even get down to the bones that are still in the ground. There's a big hill there. It's kind of a narrow ridge though. So, what we get is what we get. This side's gone, this side's gone, and this side's gone, so it's a narrow point that comes out. Whatever is still in that point is what we'll recover from this animal."
Phipps says he'll be back in the spring to find if there are more big bones in the ground to match the teeth. He says more bones are not a certainty and finding them is far from a simple process. In the meantime, he's been carefully cleaning and preserving what has been found so far.
"Will this be the biggest T-Rex ever found? That remains to be seen. He may just have a big head and big teeth. Animals are different proportions," said Phipps.
While exciting, he says more bones are not a certainty and finding them is far from simple.
"This could be a multi-year project before we even know how much of this animal we get. It's going to be very tedious and there's going to be a lot of dirt that has to be gone through with a knife. You can't just take a dozer and plow one out. You can't. You'll destroy it," said Phipps.
