Wylie finds a dinosaur - in Mansfield

By Amanda Rogers

Mansfield Record

Wylie Brys, 15, found the biggest celebrity in Mansfield , introduced it to the world and then he made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. Now, his dad has written a book to chronicle their adventure.

Wylie was only 4 years old when he discovered a 95-million-year-old dinosaur fossil in the heart of Mansfield. But then he and his family had to keep it a secret for months.

Wylie and his dad, Tim, were scouring the upturned earth along Matlock Road where the new Sprouts shopping center was being built on Sept. 14, 2014.

“We were finding shark teeth,” Tim Brys remembered. “Friends taught me local geology and I saw places that were exposed. I would drag (Wylie) along with me.”

Wylie remembers bringing various rocks to his dad, asking “‘Is this something?’ Eventually, I brought him this and he said ‘Where did you get that?’”

Tim Brys, who then worked for the Dallas Zoo and currently works for the Perot Museum of Science & Nature, knew his son had found something, but even he didn’t realize what a major discovery it was.

Wylie had found a 6-inch-long rib bone.

“I knew it was something large,” Tim Brys said. “You could see the layer where (more ribs) were coming out (of the ground).”

Tim Brys contacted a friend who connected them to the Dallas Paleontological Society, who put them in touch with professors at Southern Methodist University. The professors visited the site and determined that it was probably the bones of a Plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile.

Unfortunately, the bones were found on private property belonging to the Holland Farm and it took seven months to dig through the paperwork to get permission to excavate the bones. And during that time, construction on the new shopping center continued.

“All that time we were driving by, afraid someone else was going to find it,” Tim Brys said. “It was so brittle we were afraid it was going to break.”

Once the paperwork was done, the excavators had only a few days to remove the bones.

“I gave one of the workers at the construction site a case of beer to dig off the overburden so we could get to it,” Tim Brys said. “In the seven months, they cut a trench through for a pipe. I don’t know what was lost.”

When digging started, the fossil wasn’t what they were expecting.

“Once we started removing it, we saw a leg bone,” Tim Brys said. “Plesiosaurs don’t have leg bones.”

Wylie had found a nodosaur, a 15-foot-long land-dwelling dinosaur about the size of a pony with short legs, a long tail and plated armor on its body. Excavators were able to recover 40 percent of the nodosaur, which SMU dated at 95.6 million years old. Excavators recovered vertebrae, ribs, the skull, leg, bone pieces and shoulder.

The discovery was a big deal because instead of finding an extinct marine reptile, Wylie had found an actual dinosaur, and a new species.

Last year, Wylie was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person to find a fossil of an unknown dinosaur.

Since then, two more nodosaurs have been found in Texas. Wylie’s discovery, which the Holland family donated to SMU, is being cleaned in a prep lab. They don’t know if the Mansfield nodosaur will go on display, but Wylie hopes that it will, and somewhere in Texas.

Wylie’s nodosaur is still unnamed, as the research paper about it has not yet been published.

Before the pandemic, Tim Brys got the idea to write a children’s book about Wylie’s discovery.

“The whole idea behind the book was to get kids excited about dinosaurs because a kid found it,” he said. “A friend from the zoo did the artwork.”

The book, “Wylie Finds a Dinosaur!”, is currently on sale on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Dallas Zoo, Perot Museum of Science & Nature, Fort Worth Museum of Science & History and other specialty stores in Texas.

As for Wylie, he isn’t one to brag. Wylie, now a freshman at Frontier STEM Academy, didn’t even tell his friends.

“Some of my friends know,” he said. “At one point, we were looking up each others’ names and the first thing that came up was this. This is how they found out.”

Wylie said while he enjoys looking for fossils, he really like hiking and plans to be a mechanical or industrial engineer. If he became a paleontologist, it would be hard to top discovering an unknown species.

Younger brother Flynn Brys, 8, who attends D.P. Morris Elementary, also enjoys digging for fossils.

Tim Brys said he hopes Wylie’s adventure and the new book motivate other youngsters.

“The idea was to get kids inspired to get outside,” he said.