The Top 6 Places in the World to go Dinosaur Hunting

Move over Rex, there’s a new Tyrannosaurus in town.

A new species of the apex predator was unearthed accidentally in Canada this week, not by an Indiana Jones-style explorer, but by a farmer.

Dubbed the “Reaper of Death,” the dino bones, consisting of a long snout and large steak-knife-like teeth was from the late Cretaceous Period, were found by the farmer who “stumbled across the fossils in 2010 while hiking near Hays, a hamlet in southern Alberta,” according to the BBC.

While this may sound extraordinary, there are several well-known areas in the world where finding dinosaur bones are as common as stepping in a pile of dog poo in New York City. Not kidding!

Here are six spots where people are still digging up dinos

United States
“Scientists still routinely pull complete skeletons from digs in the Western United States, from Texas to Montana,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. The hot spots to find dinosaur remains as well as going on a dig are: the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana;  Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming. You can also trek to the Dakotas and join paleontologist Walter W. Stein and his PaleoAdventures, for a dig in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota’s Black Hills or contact the North Dakota Geological Survey for digs across that state where you can find bones from Tyrannosaurus, Edmontosaurus, Triceratops, Brachychampsa, Dromaeosaurus and Didelphodon.

Canada
Channel your inner farmer and check out Canada’s Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta which has the greatest variety of species in one spot.

Mongolia
The Gobi Desert is littered with dino bones. Considered the “Largest fossil reservoir in the world,” according to the BBC, near Bayanzag’s Flaming Cliffs is such a large deposit of ancient beings it is almost impossible to tell what is bone or stone. When I visited several years ago, guides suggested licking the sun-bleached bits. If your tongue sticks to the “rock,” it’s bone.

Russia
In August of 2017, a veritable necropolis of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and predatory dinosaurs was found “by accident” by Russian scientists. “The remains are about 130 million years old,” according to The Siberian Times.The site is located at Bolshoy Ilek near the Chulym River in central Russia. Other large bone-filled sites in Siberia are near Mamontovoye and Berelekh.

China
China has more than its share of prehistoric animal bones. The most prolific sites, according to Top China Travel, are: Western Liaoning district, called “The park of the Cretaceous period”; Nanyang City in southwest Henan Province is known as “ninth wonder of the world” due to the discovery of large amounts of intact dinosaur eggs in the 1920s; Zigong has so many bones it is called “the cemetery of dinosaurs” and “former residence of dinosaurs.” Lufeng in Yunan Province is also teeming with finds while Inner Mongolia (aka “Dinosaur Town”) is the only place where scientists have found “dinosaur fossils belong to two geological ages at the same fault.”

Argentina
Paleontologists discovered the remains of two new species of herbivorous dinosaurs Late last year in Argentina’s southern El Calafate area, which is renowned for its ancient bones. The bones are over 70 million years old and were mindboggingly huge: one was over 82 feet long, and the other was 13 feet.

Source: https://nypost.com/