Buried somewhere within the San Juan National Forest lie the remains of a prehistoric creature who roamed Colorado nearly 150 million years ago.

Part of the mysterious dinosaur, affectionately nicknamed "Dippy" by U.S. Forest Service rangers, was unearthed from within the boundaries of the Mancos-Dolores Ranger District on Wednesday and taken to an undisclosed site to wait for a new home.

"It looked like rocks to me," said Mike Znerold, the district ranger. "If you’re just walking along, you wouldn’t know what it was."

But Znerold said once the cellular structure was pointed out in the fossils, it was simply a game of "the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone."

Peter Ambrose, a Forest Service paleontologist based in Delta, confirmed the find and made a preliminary classification of the dinosaur as a Diplodocus, the "garden variety" of Sauropods, a type of herbivorous dinosaur that includes the Brontosaurus.

An unnamed geologist discovered Dippy nearly three weeks ago, and news of the discovery was passed on to Laura Kochanski, a Forest Service archaeologist based in Dolores. Kochanski contacted Ambrose, and along with a local volunteer excavated approximately 1,000 pounds of Dippy on Wednesday.

The Forest Service now plans to monitor the site where the remainder of Dippy rests until paleontologists can decide whether to fully excavate the dinosaur or let it emerge from the ground naturally. The Forest Service would not reveal the exact location of the dinosaur for fear the remaining parts of Dippy would be stolen before the dinosaur could be fully excavated.

Although remains of the Diplodocus are common fossils in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, intact skeletons are rare.

"There’s not a whole lot of fully intact ones. Even the one we have is from Dinosaur National Monument, and it’s about 60 percent complete," explained Bryan Small, a fossil-preparer at the Denver Museum of Natural History.

And if the recent find includes an intact skull, it would be a first. "Animal skulls are always rare because they tend to fall apart," said Small, who explained that the find’s significance would depend on the quality of the skeleton and what type of rock it was preserved in.

"It depends on the rock. If it’s hard sandstone, then you have a real problem," Small said.

"What we picked up was what was just on the surface and some bones that were exposed within the cliff slope," Kochanski said. Znerold said that some of the fossilized bones were as large as baseballs, and some as large as basketballs.

The fossilized bones they found are not light, but neither was the dinosaur. On average, a Diplodocus weighed nearly 10 tons. Typical of sauropods, they have long necks and bodies. The skeleton of a Diplodocus at the Denver Museum of Natural History is about 75 feet long. But these dinosaurs had brains the size of a fist.