Dinosaur museum discovers 70 million-year-old fossil underneath own car park

A hole, drilled more than 230 metres, was made to study geothermal heating potential.

However, the discovery isn't particularly eye-catching.

Although, the odds of finding the hockey-puck-shaped rock was incredibly small.

With the hole only 5 centimetres wide, museum officials described just how unlikely the "incredible feat" of finding the dinosaur was.

"Finding a dinosaur bone in a core is like hitting a hole in one from the moon," the museum’s curator of geology James Hagadorn said.

"It's like winning the Willy Wonka factory."

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"It's super rare," Hagadorn added.

Museum officials said only two similar finds have been recorded in bore hole samples anywhere in the world.

It makes finding one on the grounds of a dinosaur museum even more incredible.

The source of the bone is believed to have come from a vertebra of a small, plant-eating dinosaur.

It lived in the late Cretaceous period about 67.5 million years ago.

Scientists have said that an asteroid about 66 million years ago brought the long era of dinosaurs to an end.

Fossilised vegetation was also found in the bore hole nearby the bone.

“This animal was living in what was probably a swampy environment that would have been heavily vegetated at the time,” the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology Patrick O'Connor said.

These types of discoveries in the area include portions of Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops-type fossils.

But, O'Connor said the recent discovery was the deepest and oldest one yet.

The find had a mixed reaction between experts with New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque's curator of paleontology Thomas Williamson saying "it's a surprise, I guess".

"Scientifically it's not that exciting," he added.

He said there was no way to determine what species of dinosaur it was.

However, Erin LaCount, a director of education programs at Dinosaur Ridge, said it was "absolutely legit and very cool".

She said the fossil's shape suggested it was a "duck-billed dinosaur or thescelosaurus".

The fossil is now on display at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, but Hagadorn said while he would love to see further excavations at the parking lot, he didn't believe he would be able to get the approval.