You’ve heard that story before where a kid randomly discovers a dinosaur in his backyard. Well, this wasn’t random or in a backyard exactly, but a former high school student Kevin Terris did find the rare fossil of a baby dinosaur that two paleontologists had previously missed.

In 2009, Terris had joined fellow students from Webb Schools in Claremont, Calif., and professional paleontologists from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology on an annual summer dig. The team was on their second-to-last day of exploration when Terris noticed a mushroom-shaped rock poking out of the ground.

“I sort of popped under it and saw a bit of bone sticking out,” says Terris, who then called out his teacher Andrew Farke, a professional paleontologist and a curator at the Alf Museum. Neither of them thought much of the rock at first as the area had been looked over several times with no results.

“It’s a little embarrassing,” Farke says. “We assumed there wasn’t a fossil there because we had already looked at that area several times before.”

The two had started to walk away from the rock when they flipped over a loose portion that exposed the skull of Parasaurolophus, a duck-billed species well-known for a tube-like crest that extends from above its eyes and arches behind its skull. The dinosaur was an herbivore and walked North America 75 million years ago.

Most of the time, what paleontologists find in the field are fragments of bones or incomplete fossils of dinosaurs. According to Terris, the tiny baby dinosaur, which he nicknamed “Joe,” is the smallest and most complete fossil of the youngest recorded Parasaurolophus ever recorded.

Finding this fossil is paramount to better understanding key features of this type of dinosaur: the crest and how it got it and why. Other duck-billed dinosaurs also have crests; however according to Farke, the Parasaurolophus crest was more circular, broad and long. The other dinosaurs had crests that appeared more like a spike off their head or flat, semi circles.

Terris is now a Montana State University student studying paleontology, but his biggest accomplishment may always be Joe’s discovery. “That was exciting simply because a lot of new research could be made on the development of that species,” Terris says.

The research paper was published Tuesday in the open access scientific journal PeerJ. It was co-authored by three other high school students involved in collecting and publishing the fossil, with information that describes more detailed findings from the skeleton of Joe.