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The first stegosaurus skeleton to go under the hammer is set to fetch millions of dollars in New York. But the extraordinary discovery was made by chance, thousands of miles away out west during one man’s birthday stroll, writes Stephen Smith.
It’s every child’s dream to wander into the garden and come face to face with a real-life dinosaur, ideally one of the less terrifying ones which follow a sensible plant-based diet.
For most of us, a dream is all it is, but not for a man called Jason Cooper.
He has encountered dinosaurs in his backyard not once but on many different occasions.
In fact, when he goes for a stroll around his property in the American Southwest, he’s more likely than not to run into a creature from prehistoric times.
But even so, he may never come across a specimen quite like the one he stumbled upon a couple of years ago, an animal so massive that if it appeared on a London street, it would measure up to an old, double-decker Routemaster bus – though you’d want to be careful about which one you boarded.
It was an enormous stegosaurus, in excellent condition for a beast that’s spent the past 150 million years below ground.
It’s almost 11.5ft tall (3.5m) and fully 27ft from the top of its head to the tip of its scaly tail.
Mr Cooper has dubbed it “Apex”, because its formidable dimensions would have made it a dominant animal in its environment.
With the help of some friends, he’s cleaned it up and put it back together again.
And
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