90-Million-year-Old Turtle Fossil Stumbled Upon During Nature Hike

A museum volunteer stumbled upon a 90-million-year-old turtle fossil while on a nature hike in New Mexico, according to reports.

What Jeff Dornbusch, a volunteer with the Truth or Consequences museum in southern New Mexico, thought was simply a pile of rocks turned out to be a rare find.

"I never really knew this area as a place for marine fossils - shells and stuff in the mountains," he told Las Cruces Sun-News.

Dornbusch initially spotted the fossil - identified from its light gray coloring amidst the brown dirt - more than a decade ago. However, he wasn't able to find its exact location again until two summers ago. Quite ironically, it was about six miles east of Turtleback Mountain, a well-known peak near Truth or Consequences.

The prehistoric turtle is thought to have lived in a swampy environment tens of millions of years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, based upon the surrounding dirt.

"Basically, what this is a swampy, near-shore environment," said Tom Suazo, part of a four-person team who excavated the turtle remains last week.

The Cretaceous Period lasted from "146 to 65.5 million years ago" and is well known for being the time period when dinosaurs went extinct, according to The Smithsonian Institution.

Scientists plan to move the turtle, of the genus Adocus, to the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Museum of Natural History where it will join the 25,000 other fossils in its collection.

When Dornbusch stumbled upon the fossil, he was right to contact the US Bureau of Land Management about the find, according to Las Cruces Sun-News, because vertebrate fossils like turtles are protected on federal land, and people face series fines for removing them themselves.

This isn't the first fossil to be found in New Mexico this year. In early June, a bachelor party at Elephant Butte Lake stumbled across a 3-million-year-old fossilized stegomastodon skull, an elephant-like creature.