Have you ever searched for a pair of glasses, only to realize that they were on your head the whole time?

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is filled with exhibits of dinosaur skeletons. And in the scientific equivalent of tossing couch cushions, its scientists discovered a dinosaur fossil deep — really deep — below the surface of one of its own parking lots, the museum announced this week.

The fossil, estimated to be about 70 million years old, was buried 763 feet below the surface and unearthed because of a drilling project that aimed to better understand the geology of the Denver Basin. The museum wanted to understand the geology to see if it would be possible to replace natural gas with geothermal systems to heat and cool the museum.

Two drilling rigs bore test holes under one of the museum’s paved parking lots, reaching almost 1,000 feet below the surface.

On Jan. 30, one of the museum’s geologists, who was sifting through what had been extracted, immediately recognized the dinosaur bone, sending museum staff members into a frenzy.

James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology, stepped out of a parent-teacher conference as his phone lit up with texts.