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Updated: May 8th, 2008 - 20:33:00 |
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Patrick Long Time Squirrel is getting used to keeping his eyes peeled for ammonite at the Blood Tribe mine site being worked on by Buffalo Rock Mining Company, 10 kilometres southwest of the Lethbridge County Airport.
Uncovering the precious gemstone is a tedious process, with the excavator uncovering layer after layer of black shale in an open pit mine and a spotter — like Long Time Squirrel — keeping an eye out for the distinctive shape and colour of the gem.
But last Thursday he saw something that looked a little different.
Ammonite has a snail-like shape and is the fossilized remains of a large, hardshelled squid-like creature that lived in southern Alberta 70 million years ago. The fossil can be polished into an iridescent gemstone called ammolite that is blue, green and red in colour.
But what Long Time Squirrel was looking at appeared to be something different.
“It seemed like a bunch of rocks. I was trying to break it up to see if there was colour in those rocks,” Long Time Squirrel said. “One piece popped out and then another and both looked identical and more of it was going into the cliff.”
He knew there was something different about the collection of “rocks” he and excavator operator Preston Day Chief had uncovered, so he went to get his boss, Tracy Day Chief.
As they examined the “rocks” more closely, they started to realize they weren’t looking at rocks, but the spine of some ancient creature.
“It’s exciting,” said Long Time Squirrel, who never anticipated finding a prehistoric marine reptile searching for ammonite.
The mining company called the Royal Tyrrell Museum and sent pictures. On Tuesday, Donald Henderson, the curator of dinosaurs at the museum, and Darren Tanke, a technician II, spent the afternoon trying to uncover more of the creature.
As it turns out, the bones the mining company found are part of an elasmosaur dating back to 70 to 73 million years, when the Bearpaw Sea cut North America in half from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico.
Henderson said elasmosaurs and the ammonites would have been swimming around together and probably eating the same food, including small fish, shrimp and crustaceans.
The elasmosaur was a long-necked plesiosaur — a marine reptile — that had paddle-like limbs and an extremely long neck, whose entire body length as an adult could reach 13 metres. The creature is often described as looking like a long snake threaded through a turtle body or the same kind of creature some believe to inhabit Loch Ness.
On Tuesday, Henderson gently pushed away shale with a small garden trowel and Tanke used everything from a paring knife to a dental pick to clear away the rock.
By early afternoon they’d uncovered 13 vertebrae in their slow, but steady process. The two can pick out the bone from the rock because the bone is brown with textured patterns on it, with the shale surrounding the bone being black or grey.
It’s not the first time a creature of this sort has been found in southern Alberta. An elasmosaur was found last May at a Korite International mine site and excavated. In the past, a mosasaur — a meat-eating reptile with a large head a bit like a crocodile — and a hadrosaur — a plant-eating dinosaur that had jaws flattened like the bill of a duck — have also been found locally.
Henderson said the value of the find is they can compare it to what was found last year in Lethbridge and similar finds in Saskatchewan. “These are so rare, every one of them is useful,” he said.
Henderson said it was still too soon to say how much of the elasmosaur will be found and more excavation into the shale will need to take place to see how much more of the creature exists there. The digging will continue today and could take a number of weeks.
The fossilized remains will be owned by the Blood Tribe and will eventually be on loan to the Royal Tyrrell Museum. |
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by Lethbridge Herald.com
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