A college student just made headlines after he found a 65 million year-old triceratops skull.

Harrison Duran, a fifth-year biology student at the University of California, Merced, found the skull out in the badlands of North Dakota.

“I can’t quite express my excitement in that moment when we uncovered the skull,” Harrison said in a statement. “I’ve been obsessed with dinosaurs since I was a kid, so it was a pretty big deal.”

North Dakota is part of the Hell Creek Foundation, which is known for being a great place to find fossils. Harrison embarked on a two-week dig along with Michael Kjelland, an experienced excavator and professor at Mayville State University in North Dakota. They had met at a conference and bonded immediately over their love of dinosaurs.

“I have been going out to the badlands for years off and on, but to this particular site it was the first time,” said Michael, who found another Triceratops skull last year around the same area that is currently being excavated.

They found the new fossil upside down with the base of its left horn partially exposed, surrounded by plant fossils also from the Cretaceous era.

“It is wonderful that we found fossilized wood and tree leaves right around, and even under, the skull,” Harrison said. “It gives us a more complete picture of the environment at the time.”

They named the triceratops Alice after the woman who owns the land. Once they found her, excavating Alice took quite some time.

“It took a full week to excavate Alice, whose fragile skull was meticulously stabilized with a specialized glue to solidify the fractured, mineralized bones, before an accelerant was applied to bond the structures,” UC Merced said.

Once the fossil was out of the ground, they coated it in foil and plaster before placing it in a box and wrapping it in a memory foam mattress for transportation to the lab for further research. Harrison and Michael are now hoping to use the fossil as a tool to educate others.

“It would be amazing for UC Merced to be able to display Alice on campus,” said Harrison. “It’s such a rare opportunity to showcase something like this, and I’d like to share it with the campus community.”

Find out more about this amazing find in the video below.