Photo from the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum Facebook page.

By Curtis Galbraith

Dinosaurs

“Some interesting things” turning up at local dinosaur bone beds

Aug 6, 2019 | 5:30 AM

A field crew from the University of Alberta has been busy exploring some dinosaur bone bed sites in the Peace Country this summer.

They have been working at Pipestone Creek, along with two others called Spring Creek and the DC Bone Bed. They are both located along the Wapiti River.

Currie Museum curator and the Philip J. Currie professor of paleontology at the University of Alberta Corwin Sullivan says they have been finding some interesting things.

“The Spring Creek Bone Bed is a site that producers duck-bill dinosaurs and these are what we call disarticulated bones, so bones that aren’t connected to each other but occur separately. (The bones are from) a juvenile individual of some kind of duck-bill.”

He adds they are trying to find out what kind of dinosaur this is and how these animals died.

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“”It really looks like a group of juvenile duck-bills was overcome by some kind of catastrophe. We don’t know exactly what happened. We’re finding their remains. The bones are beautifully preserved, so we’re just trying to dig through the site to get a large enough sample of bones to identify exactly what kind of duck-bill we have and perhaps infer what happened at that site.”

Sullivan says the DC site is different from the Spring Creek one as it includes a variety of species.

“We’re getting small dinosaurs, we’re getting turtles, we’re getting these sort of crocodile-like reptiles called Champsosaurs, we’re getting some fish, and we even have a mammal tooth. The significance of that kind of site is that it’s allowing us to put together a pretty good list of what kind of animals were running around the Grande Prairie area in a particular slice of the late Cretaceous.”

Sullivan says the research workers are about half-way through their summer season.