Twelve-year-old Jessin Fisher is not a boastful kid. He doesn’t think he and his pack of pint-sized “Goonies” are the biggest thing in Marmarth, N.D., population 97. “We don’t even count” in the census total, he explained, “because we live on the outskirts of town.”

The mischievous grin then gives him away.

“But we probably are the biggest thing in Slope County!”

And who could argue that? After all, here was Jessin with his 9-year-old brother, Liam, and their cousin, 11-year-old Kaiden Madsen, surrounded by a swarm of media at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Friday as scientists unveiled what they are calling the paleontological find of a lifetime.

On a 2022 hike with Jessin and Liam’s dad, Sam Fisher, this trio of young Indiana Joneses discovered the bones of an adolescent T. rex buried in the southwestern North Dakota Badlands. They were just 5 miles from home but 180 miles from anywhere, really: Bismarck to the east, Billings to the west, Rapid City to the south.

The three cousins think of themselves as brothers, and they now consider their carnivorous new friend their adopted fourth sibling. They even named him “Brother,” Kaiden says.

The museum – or perhaps its crack marketing team – has dubbed him “Teen Rex.” 

Sam and his boys have been hunting fossils for their entire lives. And actually finding a dinosaur bone is not all that uncommon, says Dr. Tyler Lyson, the museum’s Associate Curator of Paleontology. He likens it to finding a seashell on a beach. But finding a rare T. rex bone is like stumbling upon a Fabergé egg. And uncovering an adolescent T. rex is like finding the Ark of the Covenant. There are fragments of only five other juvie rexes in the entire world, he said.

“The chances of a find like this by these kids and their dad is one in a couple billion,” Lyson said.

Teen Rex would have been 12 to 14 years old and weighed about 3,500 pounds when he met his unexplained untimely demise 67 million years ago, Lyson estimates. He would have measured 25 feet in length and 10 feet in height.

The entire discovery site was dug up and wrapped in burlap-soaked plaster, creating a protective casing that has been brought intact to the Denver Museum and Nature and Science for further extraction and investigation.

Over the next year, the public can visit the new “Teen Rex” exhibit, which includes the opportunity to watch and interact with on-site paleontologists as they continue the painstaking work of excavating Teen Rex’s bones, fragment by fragment, and reassembling what they find in a specially designed “prep lab.” Only then will anyone know just how much of Teen Rex has been preserved, but museum patrons will be able to follow along with their progress in real time as more and more of the skeleton is unearthed.

The scientific value of the discovery is immeasurable, Lyson said.

“This young T-Rex represents a rare glimpse into the early life of one of the most iconic dinosaurs who ever roamed the earth,” he said. “Their fossil promises to provide us with important insights into the development of T. rex during its adolescent phase, and will shed light on how the T. rex grew from a chick-sized animal and into an incredible, 8,000-pound adult.”

It may also eventually settle an ongoing scientific squabble over whether the so-called “Nanotyrannus” is a species unto itself or simply a young T. rex.

The one incontrovertible fact: The unlikely script here feels straight out of Spielberg.

“The stars absolutely aligned on all of this,” Lyson said.

Growing up Badlands

Danielle Fisher has two boys, “but I wanted six,” she said with a laugh as Friday’s media chaos played out a few dozen feet away. She says her three kids, including daughter Emalynn, live an active and happy farm life about 30 miles north of the closest gas in Marmarth. The kids play sports and get plenty of device time, she said, “but probably not as much as a lot of kids.” When dad gets home from his job, the devices are gone for the day. There’s too much to be done.

“Chores,” is how Danielle succinctly describes a normal night at the Fisher farm. “We have livestock, so most of the time, we are outside. Sam and the boys are either fixing the fence or  they’re welding, or they’re feeding the animals. And when it’s dark, we watch TV and go to bed.”

Jessin has an uncommon proficiency with Legos, says proud grandfather Rick Fisher, one of 11 family members (“and half of Marmarth,” he says) who traveled to Denver for Friday’s exhibit opening. And not just dinosaurs.

“He made an entire McDonald’s out of Legos,” grandpa said with button-popping pride. Jessin says his coolest Lego project was probably his Quinjet – a jet used frequently by the Avengers.

Danielle says her husband has been combing the Badlands for bones since before they met. But he always fully expected all that scouring to pay off one day.

“His goal in life is to find the big treasure, and so, whenever we hike – he is looking at the ground,” Danielle said with a laugh. “Let me tell you, he brings home a lot of rocks to our house.”

Jessin, the oldest, caught the digging bug early. “My wife has a little video on her phone of Jessin when he was 5 years old, saying, ‘Someday I’m going to be a paleontologist’ – even if he did struggle to say that big word, his grandfather says. Jessin owns that completely. “Usually kids grow out of it at like 4,” he said. “But I’m 12 now, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s staying in my heart.”

All this leading to that ordinary July 2022 day when the boys, then 10, 9 and 7, set out with Sam on a hike of nearby federal land known as the Hell Creek Formation, described as “a popular paleontology playground” that spans Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. 

“You just never know what you are going to find out there,” Sam said.

It was Liam who apparently first spotted an encrusted bone sticking out of the sediment. And here’s where things get downright Hollywood.

Sam Fisher had a friend from way back at his tiny high school in Montana who had grown up to become a scientist. So Sam took a photo of Liam lying down next to what they had found. He texted that photo to his high-school buddy, who turns out to be none other than the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s very own Dr. Tyler Lyson. What are the chances? Even today, the enrollment at Baker High School is only 128.

Lyson calls it the best text he’s ever gotten in his life.

“I was actually boarding a plane when I got that text, and I was just so excited,” Lyson said.

Using Liam’s 3-foot-8 frame in the photo for scale and perspective, Tyson at first figured he might be looking at a 30-inch knee joint, possibly from a duckbill dinosaur. But it would be a year of paperwork before they would be legally allowed to return for a closer look.

Lyson and a team of paleontologists then joined the boys for 11 days of meticulously removing the top layers of sediment before they definitively determined that this was a T. Rex.

Jessin and Tyler were brushing alone “when all of a sudden we heard this clank,” said Jessin, who says he gasped when Tyler revealed a claw. Then a tooth. Then two more. “I let out a gasp and Tyler had to shush me,” Jessin said with a laugh.

The jawbone convinced Lyson. “And then we shouted to the whole group: ‘We found a T-Rex!’”  he said. Danielle burst into tears. “The emotions on that outcrop were just absolutely incredible,” he said. “I just don’t think it gets any better than this.”

It certainly pays to have your high-school friends on speed dial, he added. “Otherwise Teen Rex would’ve gone to another museum,” Lyson said.

Once the casing containing the bones was ready for eventual transport to Denver, they were airlifted by helicopter. And not just any helicopter. No, this job required a Black Hawk. And that was hand’s down Liam’s favorite part of the whole odyssey.

For Kaiden it was, he said emphatically, “the film, the film, the film!”

That film, called “T. Rex,”  is a documentary that captured all of this, from excavation to extraction. The 40-minute film will be playing in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s giant-screen Infinity Theater for at least the next year as a key part of the “Teen Rex” experience.

‘At least you’re out of the tree’

Jessin, Liam and Kaiden are a lot alike and clearly share common interests, but they are not carbon copies. Ask these three to name their favorite movie, and on this matter, you would expect some unanimity.

Jessin: “Jurassic Park!” Check.

Kaiden: “Jurassic Park!” Check.

Liam: “Deadpool!” Uncheck. (But, then again: Isn’t the youngest always the contrarian?)

Jessin has a particular reason to look forward to the new “T. Rex” documentary, which he saw for the first time in Denver on Friday.

“When Jessin found out Sam Neil was narrating, he flipped out,” said his mother. Neil, of course, played Dr. Alan Grant in the 1993 franchise-launching “Jurassic Park.”

Now it is her sons (and nephew) who will be on movie screens at museums around the world, and for a very long time to come. I asked her, only somewhat seriously, if she thinks all this global attention they’ve been getting might somehow change them.

“I don’t,” she said. “Yeah, it’s a cool experience for them, but even today I told them straight out: ‘OK, I know you’re famous now. But I’m still your mom, and you still have to listen and be respectful.’”

And do your chores.