Royal Sask. Museum celebrating 'exciting' fossil finds after summer excavations

Young triceratops bones, bones from a hadrosaur, vertebrae from a plesiosaur, and a new species of wasp are just some of the new finds from this past summer. 

Paleontologists have been digging throughout the southwestern area of Saskatchewan and revealed their finds.

First up: a marine reptile vertebra that wasn't found by a scientist, but a volunteer fossil hunter.  

"It was very exciting," said that volunteer, Nate Day, who is also president of Friends of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. 

"It's my hobby to go out and look for fossils and of course it's a great event to actually find something that's large and important — I don't find a lot of critters that are swimming around 60 million years ago."

Day volunteers to go fossil hunting and usually finds shells and similar fossils. This find required the expertise of Hallie Street, PhD, who was called in as the main person who studies marine reptiles. 

She was excited at the idea of finding a plesiosaur — or a large marine reptile that's related to the modern day snakes and lizards. It has a general look similar to the fictional Loch Ness monster, with long necks, big paddles for fins, and tiny little heads, said Street. 

"We got to the site and there were pieces of bone all over but most of them were very fragmentary," Street said. "We kept looking and started finding more vertebrae."

After only digging since August, the team found a string of about a dozen vertebrae still in the ground, stretched over two metres, almost in the same position that the enormous animal would have been when it was alive. One plesiosaur can have around 60 or 70 neck bones. 

"There's plenty of land around this area," Street said. "So either more of this individual or something else new and exciting to science could be waiting for us out there."

An unexpected find was a new species of wasp frozen in amber. Ryan McKellar stood beside a massive microscope hooked up to a camera displaying a large screen. On it was a tiny 1.2 millimetre wasp, the first of its kind to be found. 

"It's really cool because it's the closest anyone's ever gotten to the end of the Cretaceous [period] for sampling insects," he said. "It gives us some sense of what happened to insects around the time the dinosaurs went extinct."

Young triceratops marks most bones yet for one that size

For Wes Long, the curatorial assistant for paleontology in Regina, his excitement lay in a relatively small bone, belonging to a juvenile triceratops.

"Which is a really great find for us because we have very little material in our collections from young Triceratops," he said. "But with this one we've got a partial skeleton so far."

The young dinosaur was almost a full three feet smaller than an adult. An adult is eight feet tall at the hips, while the young one was five feet tall at the hips. 

Another exciting aspect of the site in the East block of Grasslands National Park was how much is still in the hill, Long said, including a shoulder blade and maybe more. The team just ran out of time before fall and had to cover the site to preserve it for the winter. 

"Hopefully it just continues to produce more bone and the more we get to the skeleton the more we'll understand about it, see how the skull changes as it matures and things like that," Long said. 

'It's nice to be surprised' by prehistoric leaves

Emily Bamforth was originally at a site where a triceratops had been collected more than 50 years ago in 1967, but that wasn't what she was most excited about. Instead, she had found about 50 well preserved leaves in the Frenchman River Valley. 

"They're just they're about 66 million years old and they look like they just fell off the tree yesterday," Bamforth said. "Leaves are super exciting in the fossil record because they can tell us about paleo-climate."

This could potentially be a new species and a new species of plant is just as exciting as a new species of dinosaur.- Emily Bamforth

Some leaves people would recognize today, while one in particular was unlike anything she had ever seen. 

"This could potentially be a new species and a new species of plant is just as exciting as a new species of dinosaur," she said. "So we were super excited when we found this at this summer and it was not something we were expecting. So it's nice to be surprised."

Understanding the climate can help understand what life was like for the dinosaurs, she said. They found about 50 leaves in only one day of digging and Bamforth has her sights set on going back. 

"Finding a piece of that puzzle to try and understand what life was like for these creatures is really just so thrilling for me, it really sparks your imagination," she said.