Washington state's first dinosaur fossil found by Burke Museum

Paleontologists with the Burke Museum in Seattle have discovered and excavated the first dinosaur fossil ever found in Washington state.

The fossil is believed to be an 80 million-year-old piece of a thigh bone that once belonged to a theropod, according to a museum blog post announcing the colossal find.

Therapoda were a group of mostly carnivorous two-legged dinosaurs — including the tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor — that roamed parts of the western hemisphere from the Late Triassic to the Late Cretaceous periods.

The museum says two research associates stumbled upon the bone in April 2012 while searching for fossilized sea creatures and shells along the shores of Sucia Island State Park. 

"Most people would have walked right by it. But our keen-eyed paleontologists could tell it was a small section of exposed bone," reads the blog post.

Eventually the fossil was removed from the rock it was embedded in and analysed.

"This fossil won't win a beauty contest ... but fortunately it preserves enough anatomy that we were able to compare it to other dinosaurs and be confident of its identification," said the museum's curator Christian Sidor.

'Rare and lucky discovery'

The museum says the fossil is a "rare and lucky discovery" because much of Washington state was underwater 240 to 66 million years ago, meaning there isn't much rock of the right age and type for dinosaur bones to be preserved in. 

"The fossil record of the West Coast is very spotty when compared to the rich record of the interior of North America," said researcher Brandon Peecook.

"This specimen, though fragmentary, gives us insight into what the West Coast was like 80 million years ago, plus it gets Washington into the dinosaur club!"

Dinosaur fossils have been found in 37 other U.S. states. Washington's first bone fragment will go on display at the Burke Museum in May.