An Alberta man is celebrating his chance discovery of a dinosaur bone.
Myles Curry was walking along the bank of the North Saskatchewan River southwest of Edmonton after a day of fishing when something caught his eye.
"This colour and curve of this, what I thought at the time was a rock or a piece of petrified wood," Curry told CTV Morning Live Edmonton's Stacey Brotzel Tuesday. "I said great, something to add to my collection, threw it in my pack and took it home."
At the suggestion of his neighbour, who suspected it could be something more, Curry contacted the experts at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
"I call them the regular surprises," said Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. "Every year we get several calls that turn out to be pretty interesting."
The museum confirmed that Curry's find was a fossil; it was a bone from an Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur.
"Its bones were really big and there were lots of them, they must have existed in herds, and because they're so big and their bones were so strong, they really survived the process of going from being a dead animal to getting buried and becoming a fossil," explained Donald Henderson, Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
Curry took the Royal Tyrrell team to the site so they could investigate the area further.
The team decided against doing a major dig at the site, but did advise Curry to return regularly.
Fossils are protected by Alberta's Historical Resources Act. Surface collecting is allowed and collectors can even keep their found fossils. Researchers are most worried about losing information about when and where the discoveries are made.
"We keep a record of where we go in the province and where stuff has been found, we have a database," Henderson said. "If we start seeing more reports from a certain area then we might get more interested and start looking more."
Curry is keeping the location of his find to himself.
"The fishing alone is good enough to keep it secret," Curry said.
