Royal Tyrrell Museum researchers said Wednesday that a construction crew working on a site located just south of Edmonton had uncovered a major dinosaur fossil find earlier this week.
The museum said staff got a call from the Degner Construction Group on October 23, asking them to look into a fossil crews found while digging a trench for a new housing development in Leduc.
Officials said crews found a series of fossils about six metres below the surface.
Ryan Eschak said he’s been playing pipes for 20 years, and he said he was shocked to uncover what he found.
“My helper Shannon goes ‘What’s that?’, and I looked over and said ‘That’s a vertebra’,” Eschak said, laughing.
“I was always hoping to find dinosaur bones in my digging, but I’m also looking for meteorites and old jars that grandfathers left behind by fence posts when they were hiding money.”
At the site, museum staff worked with the construction crew for a week to clear materials left above the fossil secured the pieces and they were transported to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller November 5.
According to museum researchers, the fossil is of a hypacrosaurus, a large hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur, believed to be up to 12 metres long, that lived about 68 million years ago.
“It’s really significant because it will fill in a gap between the geographic distribution in the province,” Francoise Therrien said in a phone interview from Drumheller.
“Hadrosaurs were by far the most common dinosaurs that lived in Alberta at the end of the cretaceous, they’re as common as deer are today.”
So far, researchers said a tail and the dinosaur’s hips can be seen in the exposed parts of the fossil, and the skull has been identified.
The fossil find came just over three weeks after another fossil was found October 1 at Spirit River, near Grande Prairie – that fossil was also identified as a hadrosaur.
The Leduc hadrosaur will be stored at the Drumheller museum’s collections until it is prepared for further study.
With files from Ashley Molnar
