An amazing discovery was made by a group of oil pipeline workers digging at a location close to Spirit River, Alberta: a nearly 10-meter-long petrified dinosaur tail.

According to Brian Brake, executive director of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, "what we have is a totally composed tail," he told the Edmonton Journal on Wednesday. "It's lovely."

According to CBC News, a backhoe operator who was accidently breaking a chunk of the dinosaur off as he was digging in the Saddle Hills region, southwest of Spirit River, discovered the fossil in October 2013. He may have initially assumed it was a rock, but as he moved the fragment out of the way, he saw the rest of the fossil.

As soon as someone could be brought in to inspect the fossil, work on the site was immediately suspended. The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller was contacted after hearing about the discovery by the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, which is in charge of retrieving fossils in Alberta. According to CBC News, there are already paleontologists from the Tyrrell Museum and National Geographic at the location, and Dr. Matthew Vavrek, the head paleontologist for the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative, will shortly join them.

Although several reports claim that this discovery is 30 meters long, it is obvious from the image and the worker's size that the fossil is significantly shorter. The fossilized tail of a hadrosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the Alberta region about 65 million years ago, is another theory that has been floated. Brian Brake responded via email and acknowledged that "feet" had been changed to "metres" at some point; nevertheless, the specifics of the fossil's length and the species from which it originated are still unknown. The Royal Tyrrell Museum will provide more updates.