'Clayton Phipps often spends his weekends rambling around the badlands of eastern Montana on foot and horseback....on a bright summer day in 2006, near Jordan, Mont., one of his companions spotted a huge, chalky-brown pelvis weathering out of a sandstone canyon. Individual dinosaur bones are not uncommon, so Phipps finished his lunch before wandering over for a closer look. It was only when he saw a massive femur sticking out of the ground next to the pelvis that he began to suspect they’d stumbled onto something exceptional—perhaps an entire dinosaur.

As it turns out, that wasn’t even half the story....

Eventually, Phipps, a rancher known as the “Dinosaur Cowboy,” and his partners would uncover not just a single complete dinosaur, but two of them—carnivore and herbivore. Even more unusual, the two skeletons had been buried together, entwined in what looked like a death match. A find with great potential for paleontological study and education, the “Dueling Dinosaurs” became one of the highest-priced fossils ever offered for sale: $9.8 million.

Then the trouble began. Museums refused to host the fossils. Scientists didn’t publish papers about them. The dinosaurs haven’t even been named, although it’s traditional for fossil discoverers to do so. Seven years after their discovery, the dinosaurs are still stuck in stone blocks, clutching each other in a cold storage shed, waiting to tell a story that reaches back 66 million years to the Cretaceous Period. But though the bones are silent, another drama is unfolding—a story of ranchers struggling during economic recession, of warring principles and scientific feuds....'

[link to missoulanews.bigskypress.com]

Question regarding toy dinosaurs. I thought of this when I saw the pictures in the article above....

If toy dinosaurs are made of plastic and plastic is made of oil...doesn't that mean toy dinosaurs are actually made of real dinosaurs!?