“As a paleontologist I am interested, really, in the anatomy—the bones, and in this case, the teeth,” says lead author Phil Bell of the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales.
“But when you’re working in Lightning Ridge,” Bell says, “you can’t ignore the fact that some of these things are preserved in spectacular opal that’s all the colors of the rainbow.”
Like no place on Earth
Hundreds of small mines pockmark this arid landscape 450 miles northwest of Sydney. But dinosaur fossils are found here only rarely, so Bell says it is miraculous to have uncovered a fossilized jaw with teeth. (See photos of an opal mining community that lives underground in South Australia.)
“It’s a truly unique area,” he adds. “There’s no place in the world like this, where you have dinosaurs preserved in beautiful opal.” This nearly 100-million-year-old specimen is hewn from the brightly colored gemstone, which formed over the course of eons from the concentration of silica-rich solutions underground.
The fossil was found in 2013 by Adelaide-based opal dealer Mike Poben, for whom the new species was named. He had bought a bag of rough opal from miners and picked through it for fossils, as he always does. One unusual piece caught his eye.
“A voice in the back of my head said, teeth,” he recalls. “I thought, Oh my God, if I have teeth here, then this is a jawbone.”
Poben held on to the potentially toothy specimen and sent the remaining opal out with a so-called runner, whose job it was to drive around Lightning Ridge trying to find a buyer. After nine days, the runner returned the bag unsold, so Poben had a further look through its contents.
“I found another piece of bone, smaller with sockets, turned it over, and then things really started exploding in my head,” he says. “When I lined the pieces up, I realized I had two pieces from the same jawbone.”
Bell, the paleontologist who would go on to formally describe the dinosaur, says his own jaw dropped the first time he saw the highly valuable fossil with its distinctive teeth in 2014. Poben subsequently donated the fossil to the Australian Opal Centre, a Lightning Ridge museum with the world’s largest collection of opalized fossils.
