A 12-year-old boy made the discovery of his lifetime when he found dinosaur skeleton dating back 69 million years. The amateur palaeontologist was out hiking with his father in a fossil-rich part of Alberta, Canada this July, when he saw bones protruding from a rock. On Thursday, the skeleton’s excavation was completed.

The boy, Nathan Hrushkin, says when he first laid eyes on the bones, he was “literally speechless”. “I wasn’t even excited, even though I know I should have [been],” he tells the BBC. “I was in so much shock that I had actually found a dinosaur discovery.” Nathan, who has been interested in dinosaurs since he was six, often goes hiking in the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s protected site in the Albertan Badlands with his father. “I’ve always just been so fascinated with how their bones grow from bones like ours to solid rock.” A year ago, they had found small fragments of fossils, and his father guessed that they were falling down from the rock above. So this summer Nathan decided to inspect. The fossilised bones were growing out of the side of a hill.(BBC)…[+]