Two years ago Alan Titus was prospecting for fossils on Utah’s Kaiparowits Plateau, searching for new places to unearth paleontological treasures that could reveal secrets about massive and long-extinct land reptiles known as dinosaurs.
“It looks like we have the entire skull and most of the body,” said Randy Irmis, the museum’s paleontology curator. “The back part of tail is missing and a few toes. We don’t know yet if the arms are there.”
On Sunday, Titus and museum staffer Tylor Birthisel deployed a helicopter to extract the specimen. It was encased in plaster and flown out in pieces, the largest weighing nearly a ton, for shipment to Salt Lake City.