[upbeat music] - [Narrator] The sun peaks over mountains as paleontologists from North Carolina search the high desert of Utah for bones of creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.

At the start of another long day, the fossil hunters work under a hot sun, using picks and brushes to unearth buried treasures.

- My name is Haviv Avrahami.

I am a PhD student at North Carolina State University.

[picks clanking] - [Narrator] Avrahami has joined other paleontologists in this remote site in the hope of discovering dinosaur bones.

Scientists use many tools to exhume these ancient animals.

- But if we're lucky, we'll dig in and we'll find what's preserved of an entire fossil site.

Sometimes that's one animal, sometimes that's multiple animals of the same species.

Sometimes, if we're really lucky, it can represent a multi-taxonomic bone bed, which basically means a little pocket of multiple animals preserved at the same time in the same location.

We'll stumble upon an area where there's a little bit of fossils coming out of the ground, almost like the beginning of a tapped spring.

We don't always know what's gonna be under there.

Sometimes, when we dig in, there's nothing left, it's all eroded.

Maybe we're a few thousand years too late, and all the bones have been eroded out and all that remains is a few tail bones or maybe nothing left in the bedrock.

[picks clanking] - [Narrator] Researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have been digging at the site for 15 years.

To safely transport bones, often encased in rock, back to base camp, they coat their treasure in plaster.

The bones will remain in plaster until scientists in Raleigh remove the fossils from their temporary bed.

- When we bring it back to the lab and we clean up all those fossils, that's when the hard work starts, that's when we have to identify if there are features on it that are unique.

- [Narrator] In the museum lab, technicians peer through microscopes, using an arsenal of tools to separate bones from rock and sediment.

- My name's Lisa Herzog, and I am the paleontology operations manager at the museum here.

[machinery whirring] - [Narrator] Herzog and other scientists in the lab compare these newly found fossils with the other dinosaurs in both the museum's collection and in other institutions.

They're looking for various features in the bones to place the fossils in an evolutionary timeline.

- It can be the way their skulls and their faces are designed.

And of course, in paleo, we always look at, you know, the present as a key to the past.

- [Narrator] Herzog played a large role in the Utah dig that uncovered a trove of bones.

- It's really uncommon to find bones in such good condition, particularly in this formation that we are finding stuff in.

So a specimen like this one here that was preserved partially intact is an indication that there was rapid burial.

So there wasn't time for scavengers to come in and pull it apart and separate the bones.

- A lot of times with fossils, we only find a few bones, and sometimes even if we find a full skeleton, a lot of the bones have been disarticulated from each other.

It's almost like a wine bottle that's been smashed and then all the pieces scattered around.

- [Narrator] Paleontologists rarely find a pristine skeleton, but the North Carolina team found numerous well-preserved fossils of the same species 99 million years after the animals died.

In this case, most of the dinosaur's bodies stayed together, but only fragments of their skulls remained in the rubble.

- We didn't know what the original skull looked like.

We had to reconstruct it.

- [Narrator] Avrahami used 3D scanning technology to create a computer model of the broken skull.

The scanning software allows Avrahami to depict the intricate shapes of bones without damaging them.

It's like a puzzle, discovering how each piece fits together.

As the research team analyzed their data, they realized they had found an undiscovered species.

Meet Fona herzogae.

Avrahami named the dinosaur Fona after a mythological figure celebrated by his native Pacific Islander ancestors.

Herzoge, after his good friend and mentor, Lisa Herzog.

- I've been to Guam once for my grandpa, when my grandpa died.

And so being able to kind of give something back to the island, to give them the honor of a dinosaur named after an aspect of our culture.

Because this is actually not just the first time a dinosaur has been named after Chamorro mythology, it's actually the first time a dinosaur has been named after any aspect of Pacific Island culture.

So we dove into the precolonial mythology about a brother and sister spirit named Fo'na and Pontan.

And then when Pontan died, he gave up his spirit, and Fo'na, the sister, used her powers to create the parts of the Earth.

- [Narrator] Finding Fona helped bridge a link with a much younger dinosaur, known to museum goers as Willow.

- For me, that was a really aha moment.

It was that moment of like visually seeing, I'd spent months collecting this data, processing it, verifying that it's true.

[lightning cracking] It bridges the gap in our understanding of how these animals evolved across millions of years.

- [Announcer] Thanks for watching.

If you want more science stories like that, like us and follow us.