Seventy million years ago a plant-eating dinosaur with a bony head the size of a baby elephant roamed what is now Alberta. That dinosaur is called a Pachyrhinosaurus, which means “thick-nosed lizard” in Greek.
In late September, paleontologists used a crane to pull the well-preserved, metre-long skull of an adult Pachyrhinosaurus from a valley near Grand Prairie. It took a lot of work and preparation.
Big Sam
The skull, dubbed “Big Sam,” was embedded in a litter of fossilized dinosaur bones. Paleontologists say Big Sam is one of several big adults in a herd of these dinosaurs that they believe died in a flood while trying to cross a river some 72.5 million years ago.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, told Canadian Press.
The first samples were discovered in Alberta in 1946 by Charles M. Sternberg. He named it four years later. Sternberg came from a famous American family of fossil collectors who visited Alberta in the early 1900s to look for dinosaur fossils.
Sternberg stayed and would play a key role in the formation of Dinosaur Provincial Park, and also worked for the Geological Survey of Canada and the National Museum of Canada, where he retired in 1950 as assistant biologist.
Just Out for a Walk
The Pachyrhinosaurus dig site along Pipestone Creek roughly 450 kilometres northeast of Edmonton is a particularly special place for paleontology.
In 1972, Grand Prairie science teacher Al Lakusta stumbled across this fantastic bonebed while out for a hike. He told some people about it, but it took a while for anyone to take notice.
In the ’70s and ’80s, northern Alberta wasn’t on the radar for paleontology, so Lakusta collected and stored the fossils himself.
When experts from the Royal Tyrrell Museum started digging there in 1986 more than a decade after Lakusta’s discovery, it was like winning the paleontology lottery.
After all, it’s one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America and contains as many as 300 bones per square metre, according to Bamforth.
Pachyrhinosaurus fossils are found only in Alberta, Northwest Territories, and Alaska.
So what are you waiting for? Your next hike in the Grand Prairie could net you a fossil collection worth a fortune. At the very least, it will be a great opportunity to explore the area’s rich paleontological history.
