11-Year-Old Rock Hunter Makes 48-Million-Year-Old Discovery

Last year, Touren Pope made the discovery of a lifetime—and he’s not even a teenager yet.

The 11-year-old Nevada native was visiting his grandparents, Patti and Tom Patterson, in Wyoming. The Pattersons are rockhounds—collectors of interesting rocks—and that fall day, they headed out to public land in the Greater Green River Basin to hunt for stones. 

The trio was in an area with fossilized clam shells when Pope got bored and started wandering around. Then he spotted something strange: “[T]his weird rock that I thought I just wanted to throw … up into the air,” he told Wyoming Public Radio. 

Thankfully, he didn’t, because what he’d discovered was something special: a fossilized turtle shell that scientists have determined is nearly 48 million years old.

Forty-eight million years ago, the area where the shell was discovered looked quite different: It was a vast floodplain with a tropical climate that had been home to “the once-mighty ancient Lake Gosiute,” according to the Bureau of Land Management. “The area supported an abundance of plant and animal life, including various mammals, fish, crocodiles, and turtles.” 

The shell belonged to a soft-shelled member of the trionychid family, and probably looked like soft-shelled turtles we have around today. “Let’s say you were experienced in looking at softshell turtles in Florida or Louisiana, and you came out here, time traveled, went back 50 million years—you would be able to say, ‘That is a softshell turtle,’ ” JP Cavigelli, a museum collections specialist at Casper, Wyoming’s Tate Geological Museum at Casper College, told Wyoming Public Radio.

After the animal’s death, its remains were buried in sediment and fossilized. Millions of years later, the shell was finally exposed by natural processes like weathering and erosion for Pope to find. 

Pope and the Pattersons reported the find to the BLM (as required by law), and it wasn’t long before paleontology staff at the Rock Springs Field Office was notified as well. The Pattersons took the RSFO staff back out to the shell, which they documented and stabilized.

In September 2025, Cavigelli went back out to the site to collect the fossil. Only the shell of the turtle remained, but “Within a few minutes, we could tell it was a pretty complete turtle shell and worth collecting,” Cavigelli told Wyoming Public Radio.

According to Craig Thomas, an archaeologist and paleontology field coordinator at the Rock Springs Field Office, the shell’s dark color indicates it was recently uncovered. “If we don’t find them in time, they tend to degrade rapidly when they reach the surface,” he said. 

Pope and his grandparents came along to help with the excavation, too—which was particularly exciting for the 11-year-old, who loves science in general and paleontology in particular. (He even has a T. Rex tooth in his collection.) He plans to make science his career: “I think I already took it before I even found [the shell],” he told Wyoming News Now. “I think I already took that path.” 

He was allowed to name the shell, which he dubbed “Little Timmy.” It has been transported back to the Tate Geological Museum, where it will be cleaned and prepared for research and eventual display.