A dinosaur skeleton discovered by an eagle-eyed high-school student turns out to be the smallest, youngest and most complete duck-billed dinosaur of its kind ever found. But it's even more amazing that two professional paleontologists walked right past the bones before the kid spotted them. "We now understand a lot more about how Parasaurolophus grew its crest," said Andrew Farke, a paleontologist and curator at Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif. [See Photos of the Baby Dinosaur Discovery] 
 
 Lucky find 
 
 The museum is affiliated with The Webb Schools, a private high-school campus outside of Los Angeles. Farke and the California museum's director, Don Lofgren, had checked out the territory at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, and passed within several feet of the exposed fossil. In light of the skull, Farke thought it wise to go re-check Terris' discovery. Today, Terris is an aspiring paleontologist at Montana State University, and his discovery is the subject of a research paper published Tuesday by the journal PeerJ. In that paper, Farke and his colleagues report that the fossil is the "youngest and most complete specimen" representing Parasaurolophus, one of the strangest creatures in the dinosaur menagerie. Careful study reveals that "Joe" was a young Parasaurolophus--the iconic tube-crested dinosaur that lived in southern Utah over 75 million years ago. The little specimen, dubbed "Joe," was so young that its crest was a mere bump on its head. "Joe" is named in honor of Joe Augustyn, a long-time supporter of the museum whose family sponsored the preparation of the fossil skeleton. The infant dinosaur was already 6 feet (1.8 meters) long, however, an impressive feat when you consider that duck-billed dinos hatched at about the same size as a human infant. Meet "Joe" 
 
 
 
 "Joe" is a baby dinosaur, measuring under 6 feet long and a year old when it died. "Dinosaurs have yearly growth rings in their bone tissue, like trees. But we didn't see even one ring," one of the PeerJ study's co-authors, Sarah Werning of Stony Brook University, explained. That means the whole dinosaur skeleton has to be in between," Farke said. [Video: Airlifting a Baby Dino] 
 
 The skull of baby "Joe" sports a small bump that would have grown into an impressive tube-liked crest. "We were going to try to see if we could get something better," Farke told LiveScience.
– A California high school student made a find LiveScience calls "amazing": While doing paleontology fieldwork for school in Utah in 2009, Kevin Terris helped to discover an almost complete baby Parasaurolophus skeleton—in fact, the most complete one ever found. Nicknamed "Joe," it also turned out to be the smallest and youngest Parasaurolophus fossil ever found at under a year old and 6 feet long. The herbivore is known for its tube-shaped head crest, and this one was so young the crest is just a bump. "We now understand a lot more about how Parasaurolophus grew its crest," says a paleontologist. Specifically, the fact that the crest was already in existence on such a young dinosaur suggests that Parasaurolophus crests started growing earlier than those of other duck-billed dinosaurs. "It finally lets us understand how Parasaurolophus evolved that big crest, just by shifting around events in its development," the paleontologist says. Why so much time between the discovery and its reporting? The team couldn't even dig up the bones until 2010, because of the need for permits, and it took 1,300 hours of cleaning and chiseling to unearth the fossil—the completeness of which is "pretty spectacular," according to the paleontologist. Fun side note: Terris spotted the first bone after two professional paleontologists walked right by it, which one of them tells NBC News is "a little embarrassing."