WEMBLEY, ALTA.-There were plenty of dinosaurs roaming in and around the Grande Prairie area back in the day. Everything from Hadrosaurs, a duck-billed dinosaur that was up to eight metres long, the armoured Nodosaur with bony plates and spikes covering their bodies and the fast-running Ornithomimid.
The 10-metre Tyrannosaur and its fossils are often found alongside bones of other dinosaurs, suggesting the carnivore may have been snacking on the dead dinos.
If you happen to find a fossil from one of these creatures while you’re exploring the area it’s not yours. It belongs to the Crown — to all of us — so you can’t take it home. You can’t even remove the fossil from where you’ve found it. That’s illegal, unless you have a permit.
But what you can do is take pictures of the fossil and record its location with the GPS on your phone. And look for any other markers that will help find it again, and then contact a paleontologist. You may be surprised how often they get a call from someone who has stumbled upon something interesting in the bush.
The scientists may know what you’ve found right away by just looking at the photos you’ve taken, or they may head out and start a full-on excavation of the site using dental picks, awls and a paintbrush to uncover fossils. While they’re essentially rock, they are also often very brittle and must be removed with tremendous care and skill.
Who knows: Maybe you found a fragment of a Pachyrhinosaurus, a six-metre, four-legged herbivore. Or a part of a 15-metre long Mosasaur that had huge jaws and sharp teeth and was the top of the food chain in oceans all over the world, a sort of “T. rex of the sea.”
Or maybe you’ve found a tooth that belonged to a Pachycephalosaurs. There was loads of the plant-eating dinosaur in the area. Their thick-domed skull is their most commonly found bone these days, because it was — and is — the most durable.
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