a connection to the past...

i'd finally hit a break through in my field work!

on the scale of small to huge, today's discovery was ginormous!!!

it started when me and tony went exploring the old monarch coal mine site.

`

in his usual fashion, tony acted as a super strong "fossil magnet", and found a really good fossil spot. it turned out to be a bonebed that contained at least one (but possibly MORE) tyrannosaurid(s), as opposed to the usual duckbill contents of drumheller bonebeds!

`

meaning despite the fact i'd launched this expedition, it was tony who'd made our huge discovery... and that i wasn't really needed.

or at least that was till i looked up from the ground...

`

not to downplay tony's find, for after all is was an amazing find, but suddenly my own discovery took his huge find and turned it into a ginormous one! a find tony won't have made without me... meaning it was a real team effort!

`

looking up at the badlands around me, the funny feeling i'd seen them before. which was impossible. i'd never been to the monarch site before...

this puzzled me for a minute, until till i realized it didn't seem familiar in the sense that i'd been here before. rather i'd simply seen this somewhere before...

`

then it hit me. it was from a photo i'd seen, a photo i had a copy of in my pocket!!!

`

this photo right here...

one of two men; eli hexton (holding the camera) and francis slate (swinging the pick axe), taken in 1913. it is the sole record of this they worked 96 years ago, but back then they suspected contained multiple albertosaurs.

`

the sole purpose of my whole search across the red deer river valley was to find more sites of this the most elusive fossil hunter of the great canadian dinosaur rush, francis slate... which i had just done...

`

i'd found a lost quarry of francis slate!!!

`

take a close look at this photo from 1913 then scroll back up to the picture of me in the present, and see if you can tell how i figured out i was in the right spot. don't cheat and look at the next picture!

`

now sadly i was sooooo excited about all this that my attempt at taking the modern version of the slate photo didn't turn out (i was so hyper that i couldn't hold the camera still, and they all turned out blurry...). however the one photo of me looking at the site has all the clues you need to ID the site...

`

if you are having trouble (which isn't helped by my modern photo having a slightly different angle) than here is how i did it.

`

i'd matched up all the modern landmarks with the ones from the 1913 photo. funny enough despite the difference in angle, my head is covering up the same section of hills that francis slate is standing in front of in his era. you can also see the spot he is digging on to my right.

now a lot of the detail won't be clear in a small version of the diagram, so you'll want to look at a larger version. i can never tell if blogger will allow my pictures to be enlarged by clicking. if it doesn't work for you, here is a link to mega large version of this comparison diagram.

i couldn't wait till the end of the day to report this. we immediately went back to the tyrrell museum and grabbed the lost quarry expert, darren tanke, to show him what we'd just discovered.

getting back to the site, and showing him, darren turned to me "you've turned out to be quite the pupil traum," he complemented me comparing the photo to the skyline. "i never would have thought anyone could go from learning the basics of how to find a lost quarry and then go track down a slate locality a only a few days! even i have had trouble finding slate digs!!!"

if i was a mammal i'd have blushed at being complimented by the legendary tanke. good thing i'm not a mammal!

darren then turned his attention to the tony side of our discovery. the obvious remains of an albertosaur. most obvious of all were these two teeth.

at first glance a palaeontologist could dismiss these as simply evidence of albertosaur scavenging on the bonebed. after all meat eating dinosaurs shed teeth all the time (and 3 out 5ish bonebeds tend to have theropod teeth if you look hard enough!).

`

however that top tooth wasn't your ordinary tooth. you'll notice compared to the bottom one it is way bigger, and is thicker. that is because the top tooth still had its root attached. which either meant this albertosaur was REALLY sick or injured while alive, and thus lost tooth and root (as normally roots stayed in the jaw to be reabsorbed when a tooth feel out... no point in wasting all that energy), OR it had fallen out after the albertosaur had died (which was a LOT more likely as the soft tissue holding the rooted tooth in the jaw decomposed...).

darren was very excited by this find.

`

of all the slate quarrys around the drumheller area (slate operated in over a dozen areas of western canada from what we can gather) this was the one darren had most wanted found. it was not only one of francis slate's first recorded operations, but one on a find that could be of enormous scientific importance still today!

it also excited darren as it reminded him of the lost barnum brown albertosaur bonebed that he'd relocated in 1997. "the best of times," darren assured me and tony in a fond recollection, that this site clearly stirred.

darren was concerned for the condition of the bones at the surface. "the museum will definitely do a thorough excavation on this site soon, but we don't want the already exposed bones suffering any more damage. especially if this bed has been heavily eroded in 96 years, we might have lost a lot of bones to erosion since slate was here!" so he pulled out a bottle of glue.

we spent the next 20 minutes carefully pouring a few coats of adhesive glue onto the bones to help hold them together, and strengthen them against the erosional elements...

though sadly not all the (exposed) bones were in great shape. i glued this one as best i could, but there wasn't a lot of it left sadly.

`

darren assured me he was confident that there'd be more bones under the surface. those unknown bones, having been protected from the harsh conditions, would be in pristine condition we the museum came out to uncover them. hopefully then darren and the museum's palaeontologists would be able to confirm if this was the multiple albertosaur bonebed slate had claimed it was (and thus possibly further evidence of pack hunting in tyrannosaurids), or something else entirely.

`

as we concluded this rather epic day, and headed back towards the car, i turned to darren. "how does it feel? you know when you find a lost quarry?"

`

"what do you mean?" he asked totally puzzled.

it was hard to describe the feeling welling through me right then.

`

i think darren thought i was boasting or something, but that certainly wasn't it... no, but how to describe it?

`

in desperation i turned back to the quarry one last time, and gazing on that single spot it hit me...

`

just over there, two men had toiled away on the same mysteries that drew me out here a century later... yet if not for my efforts (or darren's for the hundred plus similar sites his relocated) their part in this massive scientific drama would have been long forgotten... which to me would be a tragedy. afterall i don't want people to forget what i've done after i'm gone...

"you know, the feeling of being... connected, connected to the fossil explorers of old," i started my attempt to explain. "slate and hexton have been gone a long time, and though we never met, it now somehow feels like i knew them..."

darren had an intent, i thought i wasn't making sense so kept talking. "you know, not like i knew who they were from reading a book, but i actually knew them from, at least a moment of, their lives. i haven't just seen a spot where they worked here today, i've touched something that was pivotal to who they were... suddenly i've shared in, and more like helped them in, one of the greatest adventures and discoveries that they ever had. just from find this spot again after so long!"

darren now had a soft look on his face, and after a moments pause. "yeah i have had that feeling a few times, come to think of it," he winked at me, as a big smile came to his face while we walked back to the parking lot out of the past and reemerged into the present...

field journal #11

it was just tony and me searching today. due to our chilling find of a possibly illegal dig yesterday, yumi was back at the tyrrell making an offical report about the site.

`

despite this set back, we pressed on in trying to find either the lost quarrys of francis slate, and/OR a significant fossil find (a partial, or for that matter complete skeleton, how about a skull... i'd take anything at this point!!!)

`

after the weeks i'd been pouring into this project, and not finding anything, i was losing hope. how could i not. they say that for every 200 hours you put into the field you should make one great discovery (assuming you've been looking in suitable places... which given this is alberta i sure had been!). well i was nearly up to 200 hours when i started, and now i certainly had achieved that time investment. yet still found nothing!

fortunately for me, tony is ever the optimist (though it helps that he was only just brought into this a few days ago!), and had a feeling we were going to have a big day. somehow he convinced me of that, and so we both charged into today's hunting rather eagerly.

`

based on the information darren tanke had given me about francis slate, most of his drumheller region hunting had been done around the coal mines that were everywhere around here during the great canadian dinosaur rush. we'd already searched 4 old mining sites; the atlas, nacmine, star, and midland.

`

today we'd came to the once monarch mine. it was close to the midland, and directly across the river from nacmine. we thought this end of the valley was more likely a candidate for slate's interest, and even if not a good one for us making a modern find. this area was nothing but horseshoe canyon era rocks, and thus should be full of dinosaurs.

`

we had only been looking around an hour or two when tony called to me in excitement...

`

as i walked up, tony modestly said. "i think i've found something." now, this might sound like he was unsure, but you have to know tony to get what he was saying.

`

translated from tony speak, what he actually said was "i just found the coolest thing we're going to see all day." however as he is such a nice and under spoken guy, he doesn't ever say it this way... just going out into the field with him a few times i've learned...

i started to get excited.

`

this is why i'd wanted tony to help me out in the first place. he is a fossil magnet, which for whatever reason; better eyesight, or more patience, or he was just born with natural luck, means he tends to make huge finds where the rest of us might find the usual stuff.

`

taking my own look, tony certainly had found "something". it was a bonebed. however these bones were different somehow... i couldn't put my claw on what about them though.

"check out this tooth," tony beckoned to me from a metre away.

it was an albertosaur tooth. a really nice albertosaur tooth.

`

however i found my enthusiasm sinking. you find albertosaur teeth in bonebeds all the time, as my ancient relatives would come in to scavenge the free meals that were the animals about to become a bonebed. in the process they'd lose some teeth which you'd find mixed in with the bones.

`

meaning this was becoming just another ordinary bonebed...

`

however a moment after my hopes began to sink, tony corrected me on where i was looking. "no, not that one," and pointed at a tooth just a few centimetres away. "this one."

`

it was another albertosaur tooth. only it was much bigger. plus it was shaped differently.

now having very similar teeth to these myself, i knew immediately what i was looking at!

this was a big deal. this was a huge deal!

`

what tony had just found was an albertosaur tooth with its root still attached to it! not something you commonly find. in a bonebed or anywhere else!

`

we dinosaurs, unlike you mammals, continually grew new teeth in all the time to replace broken or woren ones. meaning we were shedding them all the time. however when we shed them we didn't typically lose the root with it. normally we'd just reabsorb the root back into our jaws.

`

meaning either something really terrible had happened to this albertosaur, and he'd lost tooth and root (it'd happened to me only ONCE {i've lost 103 teeth so far in my life} when i was younger and wanted to get some money from the tooth fairy. i tied a string to the back of craig's car and my tooth, and well... when the tooth and root followed the car and i didn't. NOT a nice feeling!). or the much much MUCH more likely scenario that (as something like my car scheme wasn't too common 70 million years ago!... if it'd happened back then it would have been a terrible illness or injury that'd knock the root loose with the tooth) this tooth and root had come out of the jaw soon after the albertosaur died...

`

which with the two teeth so close together in front of me (with a canadian one dollar coin, a loonie, for scale in the photo) suddenly i realized what we were looking at... it explained why the bones had felt different from normal drumheller bonebeds. more importantly we'd made a huge find!

this wasn't an edmontosaur bonebed at all... it was an albertosaur one!

`

though we couldn't tell at moment whether it was just one really torn apart albertosaur or a whole bunch of them, this was just the sort of find we'd been wanting to make.

i was so glad i'd brought tony along with me today!!!

`

at the same time i couldn't help but feel kind of useless... afterall i'd been the one out here for days and days, and in the end i wasn't needed at all! which was kind of a bummer.

still don't hold that against tony. credit is due where credit is due, afterall...

it took a while for the overwhelming joy and excitement of realizing what he'd found to wear off... then we finished analysing what little we could from the exposed bones on the surface. there was going to have to be a formal dig to unearth anything conclusive from this site. coming to that conclusion we finally peeled ourselves up from the bonebed with the intent of looking around the area a bit more (two finds would certainly be better than one at the end of the day!).

`

standing up, and lifting my eyes off the ground for the first time in minutes, i had a funny feeling. as i couldn't figure out why, i happily resumed talking to tony about our next direction of exploration... suddenly my tiny mind had a brain wave!

`

i shot my head back up... leaving tony hanging on me mid sentence.

`

i just stared ahead for a minute in silence.

`

tony asked me worriedly. "what is it?"

`

"we have to get back to the museum right now!" i said urgently, a million thoughts were going through my head.

`

"why?" tony asked in disbelief.

my stomach had just turned to butterflies, and my head was rather light (my small brain was overwhelmed by the realization i'd just made). tony might be the fossil magnet, and his find was pretty cool... but i'd just pulled my weight for today! and then some...

if it hadn't been for tony, we wouldn't have found this spot. so he was important (where i had not been). however, had i not been here the overall significance of this spot would have been missed, making me now equally important. i point this out not to boost (well okay maybe a little!) but to say, that both of us being there today lead to hopefully the biggest discovery of the year in alberta! just one of us would have missed the whole picture...

`

i'd tell you more right now people of the innerweb, but i have to get back to the tyrrell right now, and let them know what we just found!!!

`

to be continued...

`

Palaeo CHALLENGE... what did we just find???

field journal #10 (poachers part 1)

a new day, and a 'new' coal mine, in our search (by our i mean myself, tony, and yumi) for the lost quarrys of francis slate. we'd checked out three old mines already; the atlas, nacmine, and midland, so today we were checking out around the former star coal mine.

we didn't find anything overly exciting. nothing you haven't already seen in one of my other field reports.

that is till we came towards the end of the day, and we looking in some hills way at the back of the former star mine site. this was a really remote patch of badlands, it had taken us all day to get to them afterall (mind you at a slower pace due to our searching pretty thoroughly along the way).

we were shocked to come across signs of other people being out here recently... in the form of a bunch of abandoned stuff. which on closer inspection could have only been left by one type of person... fossil hunters!

how we could tell, the abandoned stuff was all fossil collecting field gear.

most of it was relatively expendable gear, mind you, needed for making field jackets. a water jug you see in the left hand corner, and the blue sack in the upper right was full of burlap. field jacket materials normally aren't that crucial once you've made all the jackets that you need... so one could been seen leaving it behind if they had too...

however the yellow and blue pack sack had been used to haul in more important equipment. only in this case this equipment hadn't been up to the task.

when we opened it, inside the bad were broken awls (an awl is like a chisel, that you use to remove hard rock around a fossil), mud gummed paint and tooth brushes (used to softly remove rock around fossils), and finally a jack hammer or rock saw motor. we couldn't tell which it was from, but it was certainly a motor, a very broken one (they'd ripped it apart trying to fix it!).

me and tony stared at our "find" for several minutes in stunned silence.

i broke the quiet first, by longingly suggesting this might be a tyrrell dig site, and they'd simply just left the gear here overnight for when they came back to resume work tomorrow.

of course i was pretty sure this wasn't the case, and tony confirmed my suspicion immediately. the museum didn't have any field work going on right now, and had done none this season around this part of the valley.

furthermore if it had been a tyrrell team they never would have left gear lying around like this. for one the field jacketing supplies, while not the most vital, were still usable, and thus would still have been taken out with the rest of a team's gear. even the "rubbish" bag would never have been left as it would be polluting the badlands. waste like this would be hauled back to be properly disposed of.

no, sadly the story tony and yumi came up with after looking at the stuff was a bit more alarming. someone else had come out here to dig, which would have been against the law if not done without tyrrell approval (as the tyrrell is home to alberta's fossil permit issuing officer).

based on the tools being used, these were experienced people (often members of the general public pick equipment to dig fossils that might appear to be ideal, but in reality aren't as good as what we "pros" would use instead), so we could rule out amateurs. meaning they probably had a purpose being out here. they weren't going to be just digging up random edmontosaur bones (as is often the case with casual fossil diggers in alberta).

tony, whose been on a lot of museum sanctioned digs, thought based on the broken tools and especially the motor, we were looking at our mystery diggers first excavation attempt (i didn't like how tony was implying there were going to be more...). they'd probably picked up second hand or second rate tools to avoid being noticed, but after using them in real conditions had wrecked the substandard ones (which if you're trying to buy under the radar goods would happen).

which seemed to match the facts. the awls and brushes were no longer usable. they'd taken the rest of the jack hammer or saw with them, and simply abandoned the now dead motor. it would probably be easy to replace this single part (as opposed to the whole tool).

the field jacket supplies, tony reckoned, were left behind as they were easily replaced, and carrying less out of here would attract less attention. which if you were carrying out fossils collected illegally is just what you want to do. avoid anyone realizing you were taking them!

which they so far seemed to have done. had we not been out here today, this dig site may never have been noticed. a year from now, all the run off from rain and snow could very well have washed away or buried this gear.

the big question we were left with was who had done this? and more to the point what were they after?!?

yumi said she'd file an official report with the tyrrell tomorrow, and hopefully get an investigation into the incident launched (assuming there was a problem... there was still a chance this was a sanctioned dig we hadn't heard about... but we all doubted it, given the abandoned gear). this doubled the dark ramifications of today's find. not only was there a modern mystery quarry, but now yumi was taken out of action tomorrow on account of it.

i had a bad feeling about this...

field journal #9

so far the great canadian dinosaur rush era fossil hunter francis slate's lost quarrys had been elusive. i hoped recruiting my friends/former tyrrell coworkers tony and yumi would help me track these down, or at least help make a significant fossil discovery along the search.
`
based on the evidence i had at hand, mr. slate had done a lot of his drumheller area work around the many coal mines operating here during the dinosaur rush. his clever strategy was to save time by investigating and following up the discoveries made by the miners in their daily encounters with the local geology. meaning slate had potentially thousands of fossil hunters at his disposal (as there were thousands of miners living here in that era... though realistically most wouldn't have been looking for fossils, but the few that did would have been huge time savers).

we'd already checked out the areas around 2 of the valley's coal mines, the atlas and midland, but with no luck. not that this was casting doubts on slate's site being out there! with over 20 more of them out there it was time for us to pick up the pace, if we were going to exhaust all avenues!

so today we popped by the area around nacmine (the north american coal mine). in modern times there is still a small community which still bears the name of the mine, but 70 years ago it would have way bigger, and right under one of the biggest mines in operation in the valley.

it was a funny day of fossil hunting though, and not what i'd expected...

i'd brought along tony, as typically he is something of a fossil magnet. on every trip i have gone on with him (including the one to DPP), tony always manages to find the best stuff.

its not that i'm a bad fossil hunter, but i have to look real hard to find cool stuff. tony is a natural though. my guess is he has keener sight and sees the differences in rocks much better than me.

however if not thinking of it as a physical difference (which i'm sure it must be), it can appear as though tony just randomly stumbles on great fossils by accident (which to be fair a few times des happen... he'll walk right past a good spot first. one that even i with less keen senses would probably have spotted).
`
today though i didn't need tony apparently. of all the finds we made, mine were the most impressive. sadly they weren't anything too spectacular...

this dinosaur vertebrae was our first "cool" find of the day. due to its heavy encasing in iron stone, we couldn't ID it. however as this is the horseshoe canyon formation it is a super safe bet that this would turn out to be an edmontosaur if we were to collect and prep it. edmontosaurs are STUPID common around here! you'll find 10 (some say as many of 20) edmontos before you find something else!

when tony came to inspect it, he was of the same opinion as me. we'd found plenty of broken scraps of bone so far, and this was our only in-situ bone (fancy wording for found in its original burial place). that still didn't warrant us wasting anytime on it. especially given its being encased in iron stone, and lack of other bones in association with it. this wasn't the big find we were hoping for...

at the same time tony was impressed. not that either of us thought i was bad at fossil hunting. we're both just used to him outshining me in the field on caliber of material found (i'd find the same amount, but nothing as cool as his...). i'd out done him... for now...

my last find of today had me think maybe the tables had turned. maybe i'd suddenly became a fossil magnet like tony...

`

i found a pretty patchy micro fossil site, with little of interest in it. except for this one fossil...

an intact hadrosaur tooth! (you guessed it, edmontosaur most likely! though there is a slight chance it could be from one of the other rarer hadrosaurs of the horseshoe canyon era).

with that conclusion, nacmine turned out to be a dead end.

which is sad. in addition to slate, there was a slim chance we could have come across another BIG lost quarry. that being the site of joseph burr tyrrell's first albertosaur. it was in this area that he recorded finding it. however that was well over a 100 years ago. erosion by now most likely had wiped out the surface layers he had been working on. coupled with his only taking the skull it wasn't a big dig (though if erosion hadn't destroyed the spot that meant the body could still be there!), and won't be easy to spot. so it isn't surprising we didn't find it.

at the same time a tyrannosaur can dream a little can't he?

field journal #8

francis slate may have gone to great lengths to hide his activities a 100 years ago, during the great canadian dinosaur rush, but the mystery surrounding him was about to be under threat. as it was no longer just me hunting for his lost quarrys...

i now had a "team"... well 2 other people, tony and yumi, but that could be considered a team after a fashion (just not a very big one)... both of whom were going to help me track down mr. slate and his past operations.

with more people in gathered to the cause, all we had to do now was go to a suitable location to apply ourselves. as i had reasonable evidence that a lot of mr. slate's exploits (in the drumheller region anyway) were based around some of the 20+ coal mines operating in the area at the time, we would need to focus our efforts around these former mine sites.

i'd already checked out the most obvious coal mine in the valley, the atlas historic site, but fortunately for us one more mine that was still easy to find...

midland provincal park.

this name might sound familiar, and if you read my blog a lot you'd be right. midland has come up before, as the tyrrell museum is situated in this park. however we weren't going to be looking around the museum as (i already had, and) it marked the outer west boundary of the park, and wasn't what the park was established for originally.

midland provincal park had been setup in the beginning to perserve the site and artifacts of the old midland coal mine.

we wanted look around this old mine, so we needed to search the park's interior (as opposed to the fringe of the mine's propery that is around the tyrrell).

within minutes of wandering the park we encountered plenty of evidence of the once bustling mining activity. there were 4 old mining carts in our first search area, this one here being the most intact of the lot.

it was cool to think that this had once been used to bring loads of coal out of the hills around us, and back out to the surface for the first time in 72 million years!

it became pretty clear why they'd been mining this area. though there were many excellent fossil bearing layers of sandstone and mudstone, there were 3 thick huge coal seams running between the fossil layers!

then as i walked around a bend my heart nearly stopped. on the hill in front of me was a bunch of junk!

why was i so excited by old timbers and random debris? because one man's garbage can be a tyrannosaur's treasure...

was this evidence of an old slate quarry?!?

turning around to excitedly call over tony and yumi, i realized the few scraps i saw on the hillside were just the tip of the... uh coal-berg. scattered all around me were yet more remenants and left overs of the coal mine's operations... definately not stuff left behind by francis slate.

`

i saddened a little bit. it made sense that a coal mine which operated for over two decades, and whose purpose was to tear apart the landscape around me, would leave a lot more evidence of its existence than a single palaeontologist passing through here for a couple days...

`

this presented me with a new problem (and no doubt one of the reasons slate had remained elusive for all these years). if i was going to find slate around these mines, i couldn't count on over half the means that darren tanke uses to find lost quarrys. (which is probably why he seldom bothers looking for lost quarrys around drumheller. the mines cause a lot of artifact pollution!)
`
fortunately i wasn't looking for unknown mystery quarrys. i had photographs of slate working this area. meaning i had one sure fire way of pin pointing where he was working. i'd have to find the actually spot of the dig sites and make sure i was watching the landscape around me carefully to not miss them!

midland ended up a bust, but not to worry. tony already had another site in mind for tomorrow...

the recruitment slate

i'd hit a dead end in my hunt for francis slate's lost quarrys. i had reason to believe slate did a lot of his field work around the coal mines of the valley during the great canadian dinosaur rush.

this coal mine idea would have been a great strategy... the coal miners worked around rocks for a living, and would no doubt notice stuff in their daily exploits around the badlands. using the miners would have saved slate huge amounts of time and effort... sadly a strategy that no longer exists. as all the mines went bust a LONG time ago... otherwise i might try to recruit a few onto my team today...

with no miners around to help me anymore, if i was going to pick up slate's trail i needed to track down more of the old mine sites. sadly, i'd already checked out the only really obvious coal mine in the valley. there were two more historic sites based around former coal mines... yet these were only 3 of over twenty such mines that had operated in the valley throughout the years. in other words i only knew a tiny patch of potential localities!

added to that my minor field... uh accident (stupid cactus!), the other day i was going to need someone else to help me in the field. that way i'd have someone to help me out if i ran into any real trouble.

`

since they were going to be coming along, i needed to pick someone who could help me while i was at it. afterall not everyone would be able up to my fast hunting pace (as i didn't have forever to look), i was going to need someone with some prospecting experience. fortunately for me i knew a few experts...

`

including my old friend tony.

`

who i took the liberty of inviting to lunch today. i figured buying him lunch would help me recruit him into my expedition (buying the lunch not being an easy feat these days as i'm funding a world tour on the side of my regular exploits).

`

why was i going to such lengths to get tony, you might ask? sure you might not have heard of him (outside my blog), but don't let that fool you. despite his lack of a PHD (like me), published papers (sounds like me), or any fossils being named after him (once again identical to myself) tony is a fossil hunting power house.

`

what do i mean by power house? well i'm not too bad at fossil hunting. i've had years of practise, and it was worth it. tony also has similar experience and skills, but unlike me he is lucky. by that i mean he is literally gifted with luck!

`

there are those among palaeontology who have this fossil magnet gene. it is an incredible ability to in most cases "stumble" onto amazing fossils almost by accident. in other words, they are, on the surface, identical to you and me in their prospecting abilities, but unlike us fossils almost leap out of the ground at them wanting to be found. the rest of us have to work REALLY hard to find them!

`

after my weeks in the field, it was clear i lacked that gene. however i'd seen tony use it many times in the past (yes i'm jealous, but at least i'm honest about it!), so it was time for him to remind me of its power!

`

i don't think i needed to buy tony the free lunch to interest him in my search (not that it didn't help mind you!). as i first mentioned what i was doing i could see tony's eyes flare up with exploration lust.

`

however yumi was another story... oh yeah, i invited yumi too! she was there in the staff room with tony, and since she is a good friend from the olden days, it would have been rude not to bring her along too. besides three sets of eyes are better than two... that was, if the free lunch would persuade her to give up a day or two to help me out.

of course the lure of fossil treasure, and possible fame (in the science world anyway) were too much for a palaeo nut such as her to resist too! plus she liked lunch :P

my day off the hunt had paid off, big time! i'd now tripled my field team, and it only cost me two lunches!

better yet i'd acquired not only one very experienced fossil hunter (yumi) of the same skill level to myself, but i'd recruited a fossil magnet who also matched us for skill. meaning if i wasn't going to find slate now, no one else was ever going to!

field journal #7

okay so in addition to my now thinking i might need help finding old coal mines, so i can find some of the lost quarrys of francis slate, i remembered another reason you should have other people along with you while fossil hunting...

safety!

fortunately for me today's accident wasn't anything serious, and frankly more embarrassing than anything (okay and quite painful). at the same time i realized it could have been much worse...

the moral of the story, and something i should most certainly be doing from now on, when going fossil hunting do NOT go alone!!!


i thought i'd do a posed photo in front of some prickly pear cactus (when i was a hatchling i used to think was prickly paired cactus LOL) . they occur all throughout the alberta badlands, and add to atmosphere of the area while you're hunting in it.

at the same time their very painful should you happen to put your hand down on, step on, or worst of all fall on...

which funny enough is what i did by accident while trying to set up my camera and pose for the shot (which in my defense is REALLY hard when you have arms as short as mine!) on top of the often slippery rocks of the badlands (now technically their more crumbly, but that makes them slippery like... when they get wet, and that benetinite fills up with water then the rocks really are slippery!!!).

point is, had i not been trying to take a photo with them i'd never have fallen on them! so no making fun people of the innerweb! i incurred these "injuries" for your benefit...

the good news due to my thick scaly hide most of the needles only gave me minor poke holes... had i been a fleshy soft skinned mammal like most of you, it probably would have been worse.

these cactus have two types of spines. big ones, which are the ones you immediately see, whose job i think is more to advertise this cactus is packing pain, but they aren't the ones that do the most damage. that would have to be the smaller ones, which not only are sharper, have mini fish hook like barbs that make the darn things stick into your flesh once their in, but detach from the cactus to ensure you have a miserable time after messing with the mother plant!

so i heading back into town i was fortunate enough to find a nice man who helped me pull the worst of the quills out of my back where I couldn't quite reach them (on account of my small arms)!

tomorrow i'm not heading out fossil hunting without some back up! that way if i have a more serious accident someone will be there to help me out right away.

plus i'm needing help finding these old coal mines. today the cactus incident cut short an otherwise unsuccessful hunt for one...

fortunately for me, i know just the guy who can help me with such an effort!

field journal #6

my luck looking for francis slate's lost quarrys had not been so good thus far.

though i'd been finding some cool stuff along the way, i also hadn't made any earth shattering discoveries along the way either.

rather than risk getting my spirits down, i decided to shake things up and switch where i was looking. i'd been centering around drumheller itself, due to its rocks having a higher occurrence of dinosaurs (check out my post on geologic layers for the full details). however i did know that francis slate had been working in other areas in this region of the valley.

so i decided to shift my hunt to pretty much the opposite end of the drumheller area, and head 30 minutes east to the small villa of east coulee...

home of the atlas coal mine historic site and museum. this is the only remaining coal mining site left in the valley, and the last remnant of drumheller's glorious past as a hub of mining.

i always get a little sad around here. there is a lot of history about the place, which isn't surprising as ALL the mines buildings and structures are intact and preserved. you can't but notice and feel the stuff that went down around here.

you also can't help but see it in the rocks either when fossil/quarry hunting. this end of the vallery is jam packed with coal seams!

so much so that you get a lot of eroded coal covering the other layers in the hills. like this spot here. this can be annoying not only does it make it often harder to find stuff, but it can make the other layers rock type harder to identify...

not that you have to ID that many layers. more than half the major coal seams in the valley run through the east end of the valley. which is why so many more coal mines used to exist down here, than in drumheller proper.

coal of course is the left over remains of a swamp, though a fossil itself, is terrible for finding anything else. the acid from all the decomposing plants in the swamp would eat away any other potential fossils long before they could be preserved.

so despite the abundance of coal mines here from the 1910s till the 1940s, there was quite the lack of fossil hunters during that time.

though in the layers between the coal we do get a few fossils. these are funny enough not from land animals or plants at all though. rather shallow marine (aka ocean) critters. such as this clam.

the rock layers at this end of the valley are from the end of the bear paw era (74 mya to 72 mya), which was a warm time period world-wide. meaning sea levels were high, and so the middle of north america was underwater like pictured above. this part of alberta was the coastline of the interior seaway, called the bearpaw sea (hence the time periods name), during this time.

as the sea level fluctuated over time it would flood this area, and thus we get marine (again oceanic) sandstone layers with fossil shellfish (and very rarely things like fish and marine reptiles... VERY rarely mind you!). at other times the sea would retreat, and open this up to be wet swamp lands. as the ocean would invade again it would bury these swamps, and thus why we get as coal seams.

so what would francis slate be doing out here? well during his time the geology of this area was just being figured out (quite possibly by him in some places in fact), and thus he probably wasted time exploring it... much like me today. only i was hoping to merely mimic his waste of time, and find a spot where the was time wasteage had occurred (the whole while in my time i'd have made a brilliant use of my time!).

darren tanke had found his only slate site around the atlas coal mine (and the only other known slate quarry was my birthplace!). mr. slate had found part of a mosasaur, one of the only on record from this part of alberta, just up the river from the atlas 4 mine.

by the end of my day looking, darren's site was going to remain the sole lost quarry location around here.

francis slate was pretty consistent on only recording scientifically important spots. with the lack of any fossils out here other than shellfish, it made sense that none of the other slate field reports were going to be from the bear paw (again mosasaurs or any marine reptiles for that matter aren't common here by any stretch... so his one find was incredible as was).

at least i could sure now there weren't anymore out here.

the thing is i know from his field reports most of slate's activities in the drumheller area were around the many coal mines operating during that time. i was drawn to the atlas 4, because it was the only still standing mine in the valley. with my tiny brain it drew my attention as the sole mine i could easily pinpoint. all the others were long gone. mostly...

watching the sun set over the valley i knew somewhere out there not only were slate's old dig sites, but so were the ruins of dozens of old coal mines.

i was going to have to track down these mines if i was going to find slate...

and for that i was going to need some help!

field journal #5

if i was going to find the lost quarrys of francis slate i was going to need to change my point of view in my search...

as in my actual vantage point.

one of the key things to finding a lost quarry is spotting key landmarks that are in the old photographs. if you can find and line up a landmark you can triangulate and locate a long age dig site.

so far my field work had kept me below hill level, and i was getting no closer to finding anything (or at least that's how it felt).

so i had an idea for today to see if i could change that.

walking to the valley wall i decided to climb to the top. as this is the side of the badlands it has the highest perspective, and i hoped from up there i'd be able to see more of the valley's distinctive hills.
that sounded easier than it actually was though. man those hills are deceptively steep!

it took me a little while to climb all the way up to the top.


it was worth it for the view. for example this nice one of the tyrrell.

at the same time it turned out to be a total waste of time due to the view...

it turns out looking down into the badlands just doesn't quite help the problem.

when viewed from above all the hills end up looking the same. when you get below them and are looking up at the hill you have the sky behind them to notice details, and from you get a better idea of scale. from up on top of the valley the hills look more like mounds in a way, and you certainly can't tell them apart from each other easily.

so not so helpful afterall...


climbing down i thought i might as well talk about the very top layer of the valley while i'm up here. as typically i don't poke around this geologic unit, and nor was i likely too again anytime soon!


here is the top layer of the red deer river valley. the one above the green line, which you might remember from my 3rd palaeo challenge.

this "unit" (as the pros call it) is known as the glacial lake drumheller layer, and is the remnant of the mechanism that created the valley and the badlands in the first place.

two million years ago, in the neogene period, the ice age began and covered a lot of canada (and then later on part of the united states too) with ice. now i'm not talking about a little bit of ice. more like 2km thick sheets of ice as far as the eye could see (or not see, as would have been the case for under your feet)!

this huge amount of ice weighed so much, and moved with such power that removed huge amounts of sediment from the prairies (it was like a surface based tectonic plate!). this removal of layers cut down rocks laid down in the cretaceous which until then had been deep underground (of rocks laid down after the dinosaurs extinction)...

about 20,000-15, 000 years ago the glaciers had retreated to the north side of where the red deer river valley is today. the valley wall i JUST climbed would have been the edge of the ice (minus the erosion that has expanded the valley about a km since it was formed, but it is close enough for me to think that is cool)...

at this point in time, due to re increasing global temperatures, the glaciers were melting (slowly mind you). as of such they were producing a lot of melt water. some of this was trapped behind the glaciers ice, causing giant ice locked lakes...


(Production Note: Video from John Accorn's Adventures in Discovery)

eventual the wall of ice holding in this water melted, and let loose a WHOLE lake worth of water at once. naturally this caused a flood event, and that water needed somewhere to go! watch the video at this point to see what i'm talking about.

as there were no set drainage systems in place the water carved itself a new one... what you and me call a valley.

this cut into the prairies, cutting straight into the fossil rich layers of the cretaceous, which are present throughout most of alberta, but are underneath other layers (which again in the prairies the ice scooped off). meaning alberta has a unbelievably huge supply of fossils in it, most of it is buried deep beneath the surface... much like most places in the world, only we get lucky and have a few exposures of these layers in these glacial run off valleys.


which as a story is cool. which if your a geologist is cool. which if your a dinosaur fossil hunter is uncool...

the reason being is that this top layer of fine yellow mudstone is about 64 980 000 years to recent to contain any dinosaur bone... or any other mesozoic era fossils. meaning if your looking for those sorts of fossils like me, this layer is useless!

not to mention unfun to get to... being so high up the hills!

the glacial lake drumheller layer is not completely devoid of fossils mind you. all throughout this very recent unit are the shells of little fresh water snails that lived in the freezing cold lake (about the only thing tough enough to survive in the 4 degree water!). which are neat, but just don't enthrall me after a few, and certainly not worth the huge climb up the hill to find them.

besides i see enough of them while looking for fossils. some of them end up washing down the hill to the bottom of the valley, and you can find them along side equally eroded and washed out dinosaur bones...

anyways back to the prospecting trail i guess (as i can't use a drawing board in this case)...

field journal #4

i made my most interesting fossil find today in my effort to find some of the lost quarrys of francis slate.


while examining a new section of hills across the red deer river from the royal tyrrell museum (in the very area joseph tyrrell is believed to have found the first albertosaurus ever... man won't that be an exciting lost quarry to find!?!) i was coming across a fairly interesting selection of geology.

including this very promising gentle outcrop of ironstone scattered below sandstone.

now this is hardly a rule, but i like to check such slumps of tiny ironstone just in case there are micro-fossils within them. again this is not always a sure thing, and in fact its only i'd say 1/20 that actually yield results...

today must have been my 20th time! well actually 23rd, but whose keeping count (uh well other than me...).

_

i hit a really nice micro site!

my first find was an ornithomimid ungual. or in more common terms a toe claw!

there was an okay champsosaur vertebrae. you can tell its a champsosaur based on the hour glass looking pattern on the bottom here in the photo. champsosaurs were a reptile that was very similar to a fish eating crocodile, but was not actually a crocodile itself!

_

besides these first two early treasures, most of the rest of what i found was just random broken bits of bone. not everything is exciting at a micro site sadly, and about 90% of stuff on the surface such a spot tends to be badly broken up due to erosion... you have to dig into a micro fossil layer and properly soak and screen it to get most of the cool stuff intact.

_

still sometimes you can get lucky and find things like myledaphus teeth, turtle shell, or crocodile teeth and scutes. sadly i wasn't finding any here.

_

just as i was about to get bored with this site, and getting ready to move on i spotted a large shape that immediately gave me a thrill.

a intact tyrannosaurid tooth!

as these were rocks of the horseshoe canyon formation that means it almost certainly has to an albertosaurus' tooth.

_

its not everyday you find one of these in one piece... (though to be honest its not hard to find broken ones around here!)

well that certainly was fun. i marked down the location of the site to report back to the museum, and collected the albertosaur tooth and the ornithomimid claw samples. micro sites are always good things to be aware of as they can be quite helpful in learning about ancient environments. at the same time i didn't have time to thoroughly examine the site myself.

i had to move on if i was going to pick up the trail of francis slate...