If there were any doubts that dinosaurs once roamed Prince George’s County, Md., a 9-year-old girl may have put them to rest.
On Saturday, just the second time the newly named Dinosaur Park, south of Laurel, was open to the public, fourth-grader Gabrielle Block stumbled on a tailbone from a carnivore thought to be more than 100 million years old. It was the first significant find on the site since the 7.5-acre park held its initial public session this month.
Gabrielle, who came to the park from Annandale, Va., with her parents and sister, hadn’t found anything more unusual than rocks and pieces of trees in nearly an hour. The vast majority of people don’t, park manager Donald Creveling said.
“Usually it takes a well-trained and practiced eye to be able to pick out the fossils from the rest of the clay,” Creveling said. “But perhaps she was helped because she doesn’t have a biased eye.”
The site, behind an office park, has been producing fossils since the 1850s, forming what experts call the most important dinosaur site east of the Mississippi.
The bone is less than an inch long, but it is likely a vertebra from a small meat-eating dinosaur, said Peter Kranz, a geologist and president of the Washington-based Dinosaur Fund. It will be studied further, he said.
“I’ve been working there for 20 years and I’ve only found about six vertebrae, so for a child to do it on her first try is really unusual,” he said.
