CAÑON CITY — The public will get the chance this month to watch volunteers remove recently discovered dinosaur fossils from the rock they’ve been held in for 170 million years in the Royal Gorge Region.

A member of the public discovered two “significant” fossils while hiking on public lands in the Royal Gorge Region and reported the discovery, a Facebook post from the Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center says.

It turned out to be two intact leg bones, a tibia and fibula, from a sauropod, which is a large-bodied herbivore dinosaur. They are the first intact dinosaur bones found in the area in a long time.

Intact skeletal remains are rare to find, and it is more rare to find them still oriented how they would have been when the animal was alive, according to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS).

After coordination with the DMNS, the Bureau of Land Management and the Royal Gorge Museum & History Center, an excavation team was sent out to carefully extract the fossils.

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