New discoveries begin on Saskatchewan’s most famous fossil and new dinosaur bones left sitting for years

WATCH: Work starts on dinosaur fossils left sitting for decades after Saskatchewan’s most famous fossil was unearthed. Angela Stewart has the story.

Eastend, Sask. — Nestled within the Frenchman River Valley, the town of Eastend holds so much of Saskatchewan’s prehistoric past.

If you were to look just north of the town, on top of a hill, you’d spot the T. rex Discovery Centre. A history museum and the spot holding fragments of one the provinces most notable finds, once buried beneath the soil.

The Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) in Regina manages the Discovery Centre and for years, both places have been working together on dinosaur research.

Digging deeper

Recently, new work began on Saskatchewan’s famous fossil, Scotty the T. rex.

“One of the projects that we currently have on the go with the University of Regina is looking at preserved blood vessels that are trapped inside of the ribs where they’ve broken in and healed over the blood vessels,” said Ryan McKellar, Curator of Palaeontology at the RSM.

Scotty’s fossils were found in 1991 by Robert Gebhardt, a former high school teacher from Eastend.

“With a lot of these specimens, you’ll find a little piece of bone exposed to the surface. So, when they found Scotty there was a little bit of the backbone exposed in one spot and later, they returned to the site in 1994 and found a piece of the upper lip on one side with one tooth,” he explained.

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Excavation began that same year and Scotty would later become known as the province’s most famous fossil.

An iconic find

Scotty is still a main attraction for the RSM, making it a fan favourite and a big find for palaeontologists.

“T. rex is sort of the charismatic megafauna or the thing that people get excited about. It’s like looking at pandas for modern conservation efforts,” McKellar explained.

The new work on Scotty is just one part of a bigger 66-million-year-old picture.

“Things like fossil plants, things like pieces of amber that allow us to reconstruct the whole ecosystem. So, we get some sense of what the forest looked like around it and some of the other plants and animals really alongside it.”

The hills around the town of Eastend are a prehistoric hotbed. There are currently 30 active dig sites around the area where crews continue their search of fossils.

“Saskatchewan is a hidden gem in terms of fossils. Some of these valleys are the Frenchman River in particular, have a lot of fossils around them,” McKellar added. “The valley system of the coulee that contained Scotty has 30 different sites where we found at least partial dinosaur bones or partial skeletons.”

The Chambery Coulee is where Scotty was found and later dug up, decades ago. During the time the T. rex was found, researchers discovered fossils belonging to another dinosaur, just hills apart.

Frankie the Triceratops

“Usually, bones are brought from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum to here for us to work on. So, this year instead, we decided to pull out a jacket that has been waiting for 31 years and that is Franke the Triceratops,” said Mollie Black, Lead Hand at the T. rex Discovery Centre.

The team believes they do not have an entire skull skeleton, but only a partial one.

“We found one of the horns that would be like one that sits above its eye there and then some of the like frill and skulls, like the back shield on its neck,” Black said.

Research on the Triceratops specimen was put on hold for more than three decades as Scotty was a rare find at that time.

“Scotty was definitely top of the priority list and then Frankie, which is a Triceratops, one of the more common dinosaurs we have in the province, just kept getting pushed back,” Black explained.

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“Triceratops is a super common dinosaur. It’s typically depicted in herds, but we never actually found Triceratops like in a mass depth of somewhere with a bunch of them all together. There have been studies looking at how the horns would interlock. There may be some evidence of them fighting each other and evidence like on the frill of horns impacting that.”

In the dinosaur world, Triceratops could hold their own against a T. rex.

“We have found Triceratops with broken necks that have refused and healed, so they are really hardy animals,” Black said.

When talking about the size of a Triceratops, one could compare the dinosaur to the size of an elephant, while the weight of a T. rex is about 8.8 tonnes.

Fossil preparation

The entire team at the discovery centre is involved in the prepping and cleaning of Frankie’s fossils.

It’s a delicate process that involves sweeping away the stand stone and any loose shells that are attached to the bone.

“We each have a different section that we are working on. Over time, those are all going to converge and we we’re all working on it,” Black explained.

The team hopes that by doing this work, they discover a rare bone in the Triceratops.

“We are hoping to find some bones that you don’t typically find in Triceratops, called the palate bone. Like the roof of their mouth. They’re a pretty rare thing to find, but they can help give us insight into diet.”

After the fossils are cleaned, researchers will then take a closer look at the bones and hopefully learn something interesting about Frankie’s story.

The work at the discovery centre is expected to be wrapped up by the end of the summer.