Kansas man's summer fossil expedition unearths one of the largest and most complete triceratops

OVERBROOK, Kan. - Winding along a narrow dirt road, you worry about animals darting out in front of the car. You don’t worry about running into a dinosaur. A Kansas man recently returned to his rural Douglas County home with several fossilized bones of a triceratops dinosaur.

Alan Detrich hunts fossils all across Kansas and into Wyoming and South Dakota. This past summer, he was near Jordan, Wyo., when his group discovered the large dinosaur.

Ask any kid and they will be able to describe the triceratops' three horns and giant shield used to protect the beast. It wasn’t the horns or shield that Detrich’s group first unearthed. Detrich was working on a rib bone when David Burnham, from the University of Kansas, noticed that another person in the group wasn’t working on a rib like they thought.

“He corrected me and said ‘No, that’s a tendon.’” Detrich said. “Well, it was giant and that’s what really threw me.”

The tendon was just the tip of the find. They kept digging and digging, finding more and more of the extinct dinosaur.

In his work shed, Detrich looks over several fossils wrapped in plaster. He points to one that is at least four and a half feet long and says that it is the femur, or thighbone, and says it must be one of the biggest in the world. He sighs and notes that the 30 or so plaster incased parts are only 10 to 20 percent of the find.

The rest is still in the ground in Montana, waiting for next summer when the group will return to dig up the notable features of the horns and shield.

Just like Sue, the T-Rex before, this dinosaur has a name too -- Shaq after former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal.