Fossil Fever heated up with a flurry of participants in this year's dino digs.
The East Block of Grasslands National Park was buzzing with paleontologists who came out for the yearly event. Students and others from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, along with other groups, worked to uncover the titanic remains of various prehistoric giants, with a particular focus centred around a 2021 discovery.
Ryan McKellar, curator of paleontology for the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, was on hand as many hands made light work of a duckbilled dinosaur excavation.
"We have a team of graduate students who are largely supervised by the University of Regina and also external students from all over the province and all over the country who work on this material from a research standpoint," shared McKellar. "
This particular dig sees roughly one metre of progress each year. They have uncovered the majority of the animal's hindquarters, with work this year advancing to uncover more of the head and front section. So far, roughly 30 per cent of the specimen is uncovered.
"To give you a sense of scale, the hips of this dinosaur are about the size of a person," said McKellar. "So it's a fairly big animal."
One of the more interesting pieces that was uncovered was a segment originally thought to be a rib.
"But as we got it back to the lab and prepared it later this summer, one of the students took a shot at preparing it," said McKellar. "It turned out to be actually part of the skull, sort of the bridge of the nose."
McKellar says that this specimen is an adult and that it's shaping up to be a nearly complete skeleton.
"It looks like we just might have a fairly good chance of having a relatively complete duckbilled dinosaur," said McKellar.
This specimen is being uncovered in what McKellar says is an ancient creek bed, roughly 67 million years old. Included in this ancient creek bed are other animal fossils, of differing ages and species.
One specimen uncovered this summer was a Triceratops.
"We found one side of the frill, and the animal is only about halfway grown," said McKellar. "So it's more of a mix (in the creek bed) and that tells us about the ecology more than any one single specimen."
McKellar noted that the whole of southwest Saskatchewan has plenty of well-preserved specimens, with the Frenchman River Valley having been the home of Scotty, the world's largest T. Rex for millions of years before its discovery in the 90s.
"(The southwest corner of Saskatchewan) gives a chance to look at the last million years or so that the dinosaurs were alive," said McKellar. "Part of what makes the east block of Grasslands National Park so special is that we can not only see these dinosaurs, but you can walk further up the hill and you can see the ash layer that was left behind when the meteorite hit the Earth 66 million years ago."
One of the additional focuses of this year's digs in McKellar's teams was amber. Tiny pieces from around the time of the dinosaur extinction event have been uncovered near Estevan, being five or ten millimetres in length. Preserved inside are ancient insects. It is exceedingly rare to find any insect that is more than a millimetre long.
"They tell us a little bit about ancient ecosystems, and we can look at the chemistry of the resin of the amber and figure out which groups of trees were living there," said McKellar.
The pieces recovered near Estevan are roughly 62 million years old. Pieces recovered in Grasslands National Park are a bit older.
"As we get closer to the Frenchman River Valley and places like that, we get into rock layers that are 67 million years old," said McKellar.
The amber has helped to document the changes that occurred 78 million years ago, when the interior sea that previously covered Saskatchewan began to ebb away, bringing changes to local plant and insect life.
With the work coming to a close, McKellar is grateful for another good year of work. The bones uncovered in the summer are then taken and worked on over the winter. They are transferred from the dig site to workshops at museums and universities in plaster casts that ensure the fossils aren't damaged by shifting dirt when moved. Students and staff then work to slowly and carefully excavate the fossils.