Fossil Preparator Discovers New Species Halfway Through Removing It From Rock, Realizes They've Been Chiseling Wrong End

Fossil preparator Jessica Matrix of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has made a significant taxonomic discovery in the most professionally embarrassing way possible: by spending 340 hours meticulously preparing what she believed was the skull of a known hadrosaur, only to realize she had been working from the posterior end of an entirely different, previously unknown species. 'I noticed around hour 300 that the morphology was getting weird,' Matrix told colleagues at a departmental meeting. 'The occipital condyles didn't look right. The fenestrae were in the wrong place. I thought, "This is a very unusual hadrosaur." Then I exposed the orbit and it was facing the wrong direction. That's when I realized the skull was at the other end, and I had been sculpting around a pelvis.' The specimen, embedded in a large concretion from the Two Medicine Formation of Montana, had been field-jacketed with minimal documentation, a common occurrence for specimens collected during large-scale excavations. Matrix was assigned the block with instructions to 'prepare the hadrosaur skull that should be in there somewhere.' 'There is a skull in there,' she confirmed. 'It's just 180 degrees from where I started, and it belongs to what appears to be a completely new ceratopsian taxon. The pelvis I've been delicately exposing for nine months is genuinely beautiful, though. Best-prepared pelvis in the collection.' The new species is undergoing formal description. Matrix has been credited as the discoverer, a distinction she accepts with what she describes as 'mixed emotions.' 'I found a new dinosaur,' she said. 'I also spent 340 hours preparing the wrong end of it. Those two facts will coexist in the literature forever.'