Harrison Duran has always wanted to discover ‘the land before time,’ and his desire to dig up dinosaur bones led him to the Badlands of North Dakota, where Alice the Triceratops was waiting for him.

Duran is a fifth-year biology student with an emphasis in ecology and evolutionary biology. A longtime fan of dinosaurs, he took a History of Dinosaurs course his first year with Professor Justin Yeakel in whose lab he met Ph.D. student Taran Rallings, who advised Duran on his studies. While Duran had on-campus academic support, he decided to take his interests outside the classroom on a paleontology dig in a remote area of North Dakota.

Duran accompanied Michael Kjelland on the two-week dig. Kjelland is an experienced excavator and biology professor at Mayville State University in North Dakota. The two originally met at a biotechnology conference and after discovering their common passion for dinosaurs, together they founded the nonprofit Fossil Excavators.

To the locals, Duran and Kjelland are known as “bone diggers.” Kjelland arranged a dig at Hell Creek Formation, a world-famous dinosaur fossil site. Kjelland found a triceratops skull in the area a year prior and this time assumed the two would find plant fossils, but kept an open mind.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” Kjelland said.

To their surprise, Kjelland and Duran uncovered Alice — the partial skull of a 65-million-year-old partial Triceratops.

“I can’t quite express my excitement in that moment when we uncovered the skull,” Duran said. “I’ve been obsessed with dinosaurs since I was a kid, so it was a pretty big deal.”