Scientists Shattered By Accident Clumsy Workers Drop Fossil

Clumsy workers dropped a 75 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton from Montana outside a museum here, bringing scientists to tears as the precious fossil broke into 188 pieces.

The Museon museum is staging a dinosaur exhibition to mark the Dutch premier of Stephen Spielberg’s film “The Lost World.”

One of the centerpieces was to have been the skeleton of a duck-billed hypacrosaurus, but workers dropped its crate two weeks ago as they were unloading it from a truck.

“The two Canadians who have spent the past two years gluing together this skeleton bone by bone had tears in their eyes,” museum spokesman Bob Crezee told the De Telegraaf newspaper on Wednesday.

The bones, uncovered in Montana and pieced together in Canada, were insured for $150,000. The damaged skeleton is already on its way back to Canada for repairs.