[inspiring uplifting music] - We don't have any technology to find fossils.

It is, you know, based on comprehensive knowledge of the geology of the area.

We look for rocks of the right age, rocks of the right type.

But once we narrow that down, it's really just walking out sections.

That means just head down looking for little bits of fossil to stick out.

[mallet hammering] - [Narrator] If it sounds like paleontology is part-educated guess for where to find fossils, you're right.

But there's also a little bit of luck, and that's where our story begins.

Christian Kammerer did his homework, and then, well, just listen.

- And in this case, actually, it was just myself and my collections assistant sitting on the hillside for lunch, talking back and forth, and looked right down where our lunch pales were.

And he said, "Hey, is that a bone?"

I'm like, "Yeah," sure enough.

[electric saw revving] [saw slicing] - [Narrator] And the dino dig began.

The location is North Carolina's Piedmont.

We agreed that's all we would reveal to help preserve the site.

Researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have recovered the skull and shoulder blades, and they've also identified the creature.

- So it's an animal called a dicynodont, which are well known from the Southern Hemisphere in the Triassic, but very rarely in the Northern Hemisphere.

So this is the first complete skeleton of one of these animals known from anywhere in North America.

- This is what a dicynodont looked like.

You could call it a Triassic titan.

It lived about 250 million years ago.

That's before the age of dinosaurs.

Herbivore, short neck, large skull, tusks, and a beak, like a turtle.

Kind of a supercharged rhinoceros.

So I see bone here.

I see some bone over there.

What are we looking at?

How's it laying?

What can you tell?

- Yeah, so it's angled a little bit so it's not totally horizontal anymore because of tectonic activity in the past 230 million years.

But you can see how some of the bones would've connected in life.

So here, this is where the shoulder blade would've been.

So the skull that we first found was right up here on top of the rest.

And then this is the arm continues down.

So this is the humerus, the main arm, bone, and then the fore limb.

And then this is actually the bones of the hand that are starting to disarticulate.

So you're getting a little bit of jumble here.

So this is actually the hip bone and the hind limb.

So the animal's kind of folded over itself, but you can see there still are a lot of connections between the bones as there were in life, which again is why we think it was deposited really quickly after it died.

- So it's on its side, it's almost like it's curled up like this somehow, a little bit?

- So my working hypothesis, and of course, this is something that we will test further as research continues, is that this may have been a flash flood that killed some of these dicynodonts, and then sort of deposited them almost instantaneously.

- [Narrator] This area was underwater a couple hundred million years ago.

The mix of quartz, feldspar, Micah, and silica cemented together to form mud rock, which is super hard.

- Our goal is to try to expose more of this area in case we come in contact with bone that can be removed and taken back to the museum.

- [Interviewer] How tough is it to distinguish between bone and rock?

No offense, 'cause it kind of all looks like rock.

- Yeah, it's something that gets better with practice.

So there's a few different ways to tell and it also varies on the kind of sediment that the bone is in.

So sometimes it can be color, sometimes it's hardness.

The bone can typically be softer, especially in this specific rock 'cause it's pretty well-consolidated, so it's pretty tough.

I love this field in general, paleontology, just because the chance to interact with something that people haven't seen for millions, hundreds, thousands of years is just a really great opportunity.

- Humans have only lived on this planet for a few hundred thousand years, and life has existed for billions and billions of years, which, it's almost just less than a page, in the whole book of the story of life.

So in order for you to get a real understanding of how life works and its origins, you have to look back at the geologic time.

You have to look back in the past, otherwise, you know, you're just dealing with almost nothing.

- So this is from this animal that just came from the main block this morning.

So this is actually the last toe bone, the last phalanx, what we call the distal phalanx, or the ungual, of this animal.

So you can see that it has this very distinct scallop shape that looks a lot like a claw.

And that's what it was.

This is, you know, essentially covered in keratin on this end of it.

So if you bend your finger, you have three bones here, 1, 2, 3.

So this is this bone in us, this last bone of the finger.

Oftentimes though the shape of the claw tell you a lot about the paleobiology of the animal.

So some things that are digging a lot have really long claws and slender claws if they're digging into the earth.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] Once uncovered, the bones are packed in plaster and brought back to the museum.

Here's the dicynodont's skull waiting to be uncovered.

- [Aubrey] This nice black stuff is what we're trying to get at in the skeleton.

- [Narrator] Researchers then scrape away bit by bit, by bit.

- And so I have my pin vise, and my brush, and I work all the rock away.

It's a really rewarding process though, watching the rocks flake away from the bones.

That's one of the reasons that it's so rewarding is, you know, uncovering a skeleton that nobody has seen in millions of years.

- So this is the, the claw of the dicynodont, which we collected when we were just out in the field and it's received some preliminary prep so you can see it's now this bright white bone color.

And so we can actually see those two little holes which were covered in sediment when we first found it.

Those are where the muscles and the ligaments attach.

So we can understand a little bit about how this would've fit onto the hand of the dicynodont.

Also, now that we know what, for sure, what shape it is, very broad, very flat bone.

And so it would've been covered in a hoof, in life and probably used for digging.

So it's very like a trowel.

There are reasons why our tools have certain shapes and why nature has evolved towards those shapes as well.