Canadian workers have unearthed large dinosaur bones while digging a sewer tunnel in the city of Edmonton. A tooth and limb bone, which experts believe belong to the Albertosaurus and the Edmontosaurus species, were found by drainage crews in the Quesnell Heights neighbourhood. Read more
A dinosaur bone bed in southwest Edmonton that served as a feeding area for the direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex has revealed that two dinosaurs, thought to have lived in different eras, actually lived at the same time. Scientists digging for bones at the site this year discovered fossils of Edmontosaurus and Saurolophus this year.
A "spectacular beast" is coming back to its original stomping grounds and making a new home at the University of Alberta--a coup that will allow its researchers to study the rare dinosaur skull up close.
"This is a very dramatic beast. What we will have is a cast, but the specimen is one of a kind in the world. This is the last cast from the original mould and when you have a research quality cast where it is duplicated right down to a freckle, it doesn't get any better than that" - Dr. Michael Caldwell, palaeontologist who was instrumental in getting the skull to the University of Alberta.
The fossils from this large herbivorous dinosaur were first found by the Sternberg family, who were hired by the Geological Survey of Canada to compete with Americans coming to Alberta to collect fossils. The Sternbergs gathered all kinds of bones, including the skull of Styracosaurus albertensis.
"The specimen was perfect. And it's a big one--the skull is two metres long" - Dr. Michael Caldwell.
Styracosaurus had six long horns extending from its neck frill, a smaller horn above each of its eyes and a single horn protruding from its nose. It was a large dinosaur that could reach lengths of five metres and weigh as much as three tonnes. For almost a century, the original skull of Styracosaurus albertensis has been at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Now a cast of that specimen is on its way to Edmonton in a huge wooden crate on the back of a flatbed truck.
University of Alberta palaeontologist Dr. Phil Currie has a dinosaur bone yard in southwest Edmonton, Canada.
Originally discovered in the late 1980s by an Edmonton sculptor walking his dog, the site was left largely unexcavated until this summer when Currie and his field school students began unearthing the remains of a duck-billed dinosaur called Edmontosaurus. And now the team has discovered that the site is actually much larger than expected.
"There's no question it's a site with many dinosaurs. So, it's not just one Edmontosaurus skeleton. It is, in fact, many Edmontosaurus skeletons, and then there are tyrannosaurs in there as well. It's not T-Rex, it's probably Albertosaurus and another animal called Daspletosaurus. These are tyrannosaurs that are smaller than Tyrannosaurus rex but are in the same family" - Dr. Phil Currie.