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SYDNEY, Australia – Lightning Ridge is a town about 450 km from Australia's east coast, but when it operated an opal 35 years ago, Bob Foster found remains of bones and mussels.
At 40 meters below the surface, where water could have flowed 100 million years ago, animals died and their bones were encrusted with colored stones.
Mr. Foster and his fellow miners would break these bones to see if there was opal, the national gemstone of Australia. One day he encountered a semicircular bone that he thought was a horse shoe, but which turned out to be the vertebra of a dinosaur until then unknown.
Now he is calling Fostoria, according to him.
After years of studying the remains discovered by Mr Foster, scientists announced Monday the discovery of a plant protection species in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
In addition, the remains belonged to at least four different dinosaurs, making it the first fossil of a herd or family group to be discovered in Australia. Paleontologists found that skeletal size ranged from juvenile to an adult 16 feet long.
They are also the largest collection of opal-preserved dinosaur fossils, said Phil Bell, paleontologist at the University of New England at Armidale. head of the study.
"In the last decade or so, we have seen an explosion in the number of discoveries," said Dr. Bell.
Mr. Foster's fossil collection "gives an overview of the dinosaurs and their distribution on the continent that we had never had before".
The species Fostoria, which lived in the middle of the Cretaceous, has hardly been discovered.
Fed up with the abundance of bone that he dug up in his mine, in 1984, Foster filled two large suitcases with leftovers and headed for Sydney, more than 500 km away. At the time, the trip lasted almost a day.
At the city's Australian Museum, Mr. Foster asked to see the paleontologists who had asked members of the public to bring back the fossils they had found.
"I said," I'm the guy who called you, I have two dinosaur bones here, "and they looked at each other like," Here's another one "- they do to come people all the time, "recalled Mr. Foster.
"I was a little tired at the time," he said. "I carried these suitcases on the train, on the bus and on the stairs. I opened them and threw the bones on the table. They plunged to catch them before landing on the ground. They changed their approach. "
The museum sent army reservists to search the Lightning Ridge site, removing blocks of rocks and fossils.
But the fossils have not been studied for 15 years. One day, Mr. Foster saw some in a window of an opal store in Sydney. He recovered what he could, bringing them back to Lightning Ridge and donating them to the Australian Opal Center in 2015.
There, Dr. Bell began to study them.
"Bob wanted his fossils to return to Lightning Ridge, where they were part of their natural heritage," he said.
He thinks other discoveries will be made around Lightning Ridge, where another species, the Weewarrasaurus, was discovered last year.
"We encourage minors to come forward and show us what they have," said Dr. Bell. "It is a very hard and tiring job, so we are indebted to the miners for their work."
Now 75, Mr. Foster has retired to a small town along the New South Wales coast. His mine is now abandoned.
"It's all over there," he said.
And how did you feel about giving his name to a dinosaur species?
"It was pretty good," he said. "But there is no money in it."
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