Denali Dinosaur 'Fragments' Discovered at Alaska National Park

"Denali dinosaur" fragments discovered at the Alaska national park back in July are, in fact, bones from a dinosaur, researchers announced this week.

A team of people working with the National Park Service in July came across four “significant” fragments, including an ossified tendon, according to Fox News.

Now, researchers are confirming that the fragments are “clearly parts of bigger bones from a large animal," according to a press release.

“Another larger fragment is composed of spongy bone originating from the end of a large animal’s limb. This microstructure shows the bone didn’t come from a crocodile or other slow-growing, cold-blooded animal. It is clearly from a medium-sized to large dinosaur,” the team wrote.

“This marks the beginning of a multi-year project to locate, document and study dinosaur fossils in Denali National Park,” Pat Druckenmiller, curator of earth sciences at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, said in a statement. “This is a world-class site for tracks of dinosaurs and other animals that lived in Alaska during the Cretaceous Period.”

The Denali dinosaur finding comes more than 10 years after the first dinosaur evidence was discovered, which was back in 2005. According to Fox, there were animal tracks found in the Cantwell Formation near Igloo Creek. The fragments that were found were the first identifiable bones from animals dating back to the Cretaceous period.

According to the team, Druckenmiller and Denali National Park plan to come together to search more areas of the preserve in the years to come, hoping to make new discoveries.

“Now that we have found bones, we have another way to understand the dinosaurs that lived here 70 million years ago,” said Druckenmiller, according to the Science World Report.

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