Rare dinosaur bone bed discovered in D.C. suburb

By Joe Heim
July 12, 2023 at 5:43 p.m. EDT



The bone bed discovered at Dinosaur Park in Laurel, Md., seen above Tuesday, is the first of its kind found in Maryland since 1887. (Minh Connors/The Washington Post)

Despite its name, Dinosaur Park in Laurel, Md., doesn’t look as though it would be the scene of the most significant discovery of dinosaur fossils in Maryland in almost 140 years. Tucked behind a modern industrial office park in a D.C. suburb, the fenced-in two-acre site is a rugged but rather ordinary-looking plot. There’s nothing Jurassic-y about it at all.

But at a news conference at the Prince George’s County park Wednesday, officials and paleontologists announced the April discovery of the largest theropod fossil in eastern North America, a three-foot-long shin bone they hypothesize is from Acrocanthosaurus, a spiny, sharp-toothed carnivore from the Early Cretaceous period — about 38 feet long.

The discovery of additional dinosaur fossils soon followed, a trove of prehistory wrested from ironstone and clay. More than 100 fossils, estimated to be 115 million years old, have been found so far in a dinosaur bone bed along what had once been a river. A bone bed is the term paleontologists use to describe a concentration of bones of one or more species within a geologic layer.

The finding “marks a fundamental, extraordinary milestone in the field of paleontology and opens a window into our ancient world and to the species that once roamed this land,” Peter A. Shapiro, chairman of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, said at a news conference.



University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz speaks to the media at Dinosaur Park in Laurel on Tuesday while holding an Acrocanthosaurus miniature. (Minh Connors/The Washington Post)

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By Joe Heim
Joe Heim joined The Washington Post in 1999. He is a staff writer for the Metro section. Twitter https://twitter.com/JoeHeim