Harrison Duran, a graduate of Fullerton Union High School, recently found the partial skull of a 65 million-year-old Triceratops.
Duran, a current biology student at UC Merced, saw the base of a horn piercing into the ground of the North Dakota Badlands, according to an article in the Orange County Register.
Duran was on a two-week expedition trip last month to Hell Creek Formation, one of the best sites in the world to hunt for dinosaur fossils, when he made the discovery, according to the Register.
During a dig, he saw the portion of the upper jaw and forehead with horns.
“I couldn’t tell you my excitement. I can’t express it in words,” Duran told the Register. “It’s almost like seeing a celebrity, seeing the icon in person.”
Now a fifth-year biology student at UC Merced, the Fullerton Union High alum has become one of a very few people in the world to find a fossil from the three-horned dinosaur species that roamed North America millions of years ago, the Register reported.
Duran, born and raised in Fullerton, said he spent much of his childhood watching paleontologists analyze fossils at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
Here are some other education-related news articles from throughout the region for the week ending July 26.
- Thousands of educators and school-based professionals will gather for three days in Long Beach next week to discuss practices that support the academic, behavioral and social-emotional success of all students. A live stream is available here for those who can’t attend.
- The start of the new school year is just a couple weeks away for a handful of Orange County school districts that begin classes at the beginning of August. Here is a list of start dates for every OC district.
- Why don’t more girls grow up to become scientists and engineers? It’s not that they’re bad at math, a new study argues. It’s that they’re even better at reading.
- It is unclear whether parents are opting for home-schooling solely because they want to avoid vaccines, or if they are choosing to home-school for other reasons and also happen to not want to vaccinate their children.
- As California schools move to implement new science standards, they are under pressure to offer more physics instruction, creating a demand for teachers in a subject area where there is already a severe shortage.
- When Proposition 64 was approved by voters, officials projected more than $1 billion a year would come to the state in new cannabis-related revenue. Now, 19 months later, the numbers are very different.
- A Huntington Beach High student has created a cheerleading camp to support the children of Orange County military families.
- California’s online community college plans to open in the fall to a limited group of students. It will be the first fully-online, public community college in the state.
This is the part where we encourage you to keep up with local education news stories by bookmarking the OCDE Newsroom, subscribing for emailed updates or following us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.