Four students and one college employee have all been booted from a community college in Waco, Texas for taking dinosaur bones during an educational trip to a Utah quarry.
The bones were taken “after the suspects slipped away from a sanctioned dig last May and pried a dinosaur limb and other fragments from a desert landscape that contains a treasure trove of bones that are millions of years old,” authorities said.
The stolen bones were “estimated to be worth more than $2,500, but investigators don’t believe the defendants intended to sell them,” said Daniel Burton, a spokesman for the Utah attorney general.
The bones were found and returned to the quarry but people were real, REAL upset.
Participants on the educational trip through the Southwest were instructed not to disturb the fossils, and what happened doesn’t reflect the way the trip has been run for nine years, McKown said.
Geology officials were devastated to learn about the theft and have since stepped up training for people on the trip, including instruction on how to report someone who defaces the landscape, McKown said.
Devastated? Come on now. Devastated? I’d accept WTF?!? but devastated?
The quarry contains hundreds of fossils from the Jurassic Period that date back as much as 150 million years and was a popular hangout back then for your mom.
[via Fox News]