Move over Drumheller, the Saskatchewan Landing is now another prairie location for a significant discovery of dinosaur fossils.
In a journey that started in 2012, a team that included paleontologists from McGill University discovered several dinosaur fossils that feature Saskatchewan’s first Centrosaurus.
"My advisor Hans Larson knew there was a good chance to locate a dinosaur bone bed in Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park," said Alexandre Demers-Potvin, a PhD, McGill University palaeobiologist. "It's a mix of different isolated bones, each belonging to a different individual or different species. In 2012 to 2018 we just excavated as much as we could from that place near Lake Diefenbaker."
Unlike Scotty the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil found in Eastend, none of these fossils painted the complete picture of any single dinosaur.
"This is not a place where we found a complete skeleton," Demers-Potvin said. "It's a bone bed so we just found lots of isolated remains of different kinds of animals. They all got washed up together probably along some kind of slow, meandering river channel at that time. We found lots of dinosaurs. The most remains we could identify as one of the horned dinosaurs a close relative of Triceratops. So with the short horns along the eyebrows and along the horn above the nose. Most of those we could identify them to... a dinosaur called Centrosaurus."
Demers-Potvin said it is a common dinosaur in Alberta and the fossils are up to 75 million years old.
"We were never quite sure that we had it in Saskatchewan until this particular discovery," he said. "Now we have part of the skull that we can definitely nail down to that species. So that's interesting."
The Centrosaurus wasn't the only species of dinosaur they found.
"A few remains of the duck billed dinosaurs," Demers-Porvin said. "They had crests at the back of their heads. We found quite a few of those. Bits of tyrannosaur, lots of teeth in particular. Then we also found this whole small piece of fragment of a foot bone that belongs to a small possibly meat-eating dinosaur that would have looked a bit like a chicken."
That dinosaur is called the citipes elegans, which Demers-Potvin felt was a small surprise.
"It's an animal that's found pretty rarely even in Alberta," he said. "I didn't think we would have a chance of finding it in this bone bed."
The findings didn't just include dinosaurs either. They discovered remains of crocodiles, shark teeth, other bony fish, vertebrae and turtle shell pieces.
It may not be the only place near the Sask Landing where dinosaur fragments could turn up.
"Professor Larson told me that in 2012 before focusing on that particular quarry, his crew did a lot of prospecting upstream on the South Saskatchewan River," Demers-Porvin said. "There's still a good chance that we could find there something similar, some similar remains, but it's a big country, it's a big territory to prospect."
All of what they found will eventually end up in hands of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum for future study and displays.
