The hype we’ll leave to Dinger. The answer though lies in the basement of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. In the unquenched construction boom around Denver, the museum is often the first place people go whenever they find fossils, said dinosaur curator Joe Sertich.

With everyone digging around, “there’s a really good chance those shovels are gonna hit a fossil,” he said. “So we’re hitting triceratops (fossils), we’re finding duck-billed dinosaurs, we’re finding mammals that existed right after the dinosaurs went extinct, all of that is right under our feet, in our backyards here in the Denver area.”

Hart Van Denburg Dinosaur curator Joe Sertich at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science's paleontology department knows the answer.

The Denver Metro has been “known to produce fossils, really all the way back to the 1800s.” He said some of the first fossil finds were located in the Highland neighborhood.

“That was originally identified as a weird form of bison because we didn’t know what horned dinosaurs were at the time. It was later identified as a triceratops chunk. But that whole area around Confluence Park, around Lower Downtown, is full of dinosaur history.”

The dinosaur bones found at Coors Field are kept in the lower bowels of the museum's climate-controlled paleontology collection space. The box is labeled “Dinger” and is just big enough to hold a watch.

“That’s Dinger,” Sertich said as he showed off a small grouping of bones. “So, our purple Colorado Rockies mascot is based on this little, four-inch rib and some fragments.”

All this buzz around dinosaur bones found at Coors Field and they turn out to be just a little rib bone and some fragments?

“Yeah, I’d say Dinger is not really an important discovery for science, but in terms of pop culture it might be the biggest discovery in Denver’s history,” Sertich deadpanned.

Hart Van Denburg Jeremy Schnieder of Denver asked Colorado Wonders whether Dinger, the Rockies' dino-inspired mascot, is based on anything other than a marketing idea. He holds the answer in a small box in the basement of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science's paleontology department.

No one can say what kind of dinosaur the rib belonged to because they’re typically identified by skulls. But we do know it was probably a plant eater, which means it could be a triceratops. And that’s good enough for Jeremy Schneider.

“At least we know it exists,” he said. “At least we know there was something to the story.”

Even though we’ll never know what kind of dinosaur the rib belonged to, the Rockies’ O’Neil said the team went with a triceratops mascot because it made sense, given other confirmed findings of the plant-eating beast in the area.

“When Dinger goes to All-Star games, you’ll hear fans say, ‘Why is he a dinosaur?’” O’Neil said. “And then you say, well, because they found bones while building Coors Field. The shock on their face, it’s really cool to see. It’s totally part of history and a part of this region that makes us special. I mean, no one else has dinosaurs in their backyard.”

Hart Van Denburg A small cardboard box: "2 rib bones" from "dinosauria," the label says, discovered July 21, 1993 while crews were starting the excavation for Coors Field.

For Jaimie Reams of Boulder, who spends most of her summer selling peanuts and bottled water outside Coors Field, the dinosaur connection makes the team even more endearing to fans.

“Baseball and dinosaurs,” she said. “It doesn’t get much cooler than that!”

And when I told Rynearson that it wasn’t an egg that was found at Coors Field, but dinosaur bones instead, he said, “I like it!”

“Now, all (the Rockies) have to do is win.”