A Phoenix resident on a sanctioned dig for fossils at Petrified Forest National Park hit sort of a jackpot this summer.

“It is the jawbone of a saurichthys, which is a baked fish that is normally found in the early to mid-Triassic period, where as we were digging in the late Triassic period.”

Twenty-six-year-old Stephanie Leco is a professional photographer by trade, but ever since she was a child, she’s had a fascination with digging, and has daydreamed about finding the bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in her backyard.

Now her childhood dreams have become reality.

The 220 million-year-old fossil, just the size of a pinky nail, is the jaw of a fish, which was only 3 to 4 times the size of the fossil, when in its entirety.

Stephanie Leco, the amateur paleontologist behind the discovery, said the park routinely turns up fossils from the age of the dinosaurs and has vast expanses of rainbow-colored desert.

According to Bill Parker, the paleontologist of Petrified Forest Park, scientists are well-aware of the fact that related fish were existing all over the world during the early Triassic period, which is more or less ten million years ago. Though Kligman believes Leco’s fossil may be a new species of fish, he says that can’t be confirmed without without the full fossil. The fossil was discovered from the site that was either a pond or a lake during the period of Late Triassic phase when this long-snouted fish was believed to have already gone extinct in the North America. He said other fossils of the fish might also be found on the East Coast and on the Colorado Plateau where similar rock is exposed.

Leco already had several small teeth in her collection and was marveling at the tibia of a plant lizard that another participant found before coming across the jaw bone. Leco handed it over to Matt Smith, the parks lead fossil preparer, who took the piece, wrapped it up, placed it in a tin and took it to the lab for closer inspection under the microscope.