Triceratops skull, 65 million years old, unearthed in N.D.

Harrison Duran, a biology student at the University of California, Merced, had just been rejected from a summer internship when he received an invitation from a professor to go fossil hunting in a remote area of North Dakota.

Duran, 23, accepted the offer. Just four days into the two-week trip, he was helping uncover parts of a skull belonging to a triceratops, most likely about 65 million years old.

In an interview Friday, Duran sounded a note of regret that he did not land the internship, at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles. Still, he said, he was happy with how things ultimately worked out.

“I think I found a more significant treasure in the Badlands,” he said.

On June 4, the pair spied what they first thought was petrified wood but later turned out to be a bone fragment — specifically, a roughly 3-foot horn that would have been attached to the dinosaur’s left brow. The discovery was made in the Hell Creek Formation, a series of rock formations that cover parts of Montana and the Dakotas dating to the end of the Cretaceous Period about 66 million years ago.

According to Michael Kjelland, the professor who invited Duran on the dig, the area has produced bones from three separate triceratops — an unusually high concentration.

Kjelland, who teaches biology at Mayville State University in North Dakota, said it was too early to glean the significance of the bones, which might not be part of a complete skeleton.

It took about 10 days to extract the fragile skull and “engineering that rivaled SpaceX,” he joked. They used pickaxes to dig out the ground around it and elongated screwdrivers to pry the dirt and the mud apart from the bones.

They named the skull Alice, after the landowner who had allowed them to dig on her property.

Alice’s skull is currently resting in a plaster jacket in Kjelland’s lab on the outskirts of Valley City, North Dakota.

“I’m not totally sure yet where she’s going,” Kjelland said Friday. “I want it to be somewhere where a lot of folks can visit her and see her and maybe do some research on her.”

For his part, Duran said he hoped to take some of the molds back to the Merced campus.

This summer, he is taking a course in organic chemistry in order to graduate in the fall. He is not sure yet what career he wants to pursue, but it will most likely be in biotechnology or paleontology, he said.

And he plans to keep digging in North Dakota.

“There are plenty of secrets that remain in the Badlands,” he said.