History
of Discovery

Pipestone – A Personal perspective on a not-so terrible lizard

The word dinosaur, meaning "terrible lizard," was first coined by Richard Owen in 1842 to describe the fossils of what appeared to be reptiles that were being discovered in England.

"Autumn leaves drift by my window..."

Dinosaurs were the furthest thought from my mind that Labour Day weekend in 1972 when my wife Doreen and I took visiting Calgary friends Ernest and Louise to Pipestone Creek for a last autumn picnic. Ernest was a science teacher, as was I, and I thought he might enjoy seeing some of the interesting plant fossils that I had previously found along the creek. I had previously walked many streambeds in the Grande Prairie area to find fossil locations to which I could take my science classes from Montrose Junior High School. Students love field trips: a break from the books into the fascinating world of fossils.

"Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones..."

First the plant fossils, then a walk upstream. After several hundred meters, we spotted what looked like dark brown fossilized rib fragments in the creek bed. Where did they come from? Being quick-witted, I knew this couldn't be the Garden of Eden, and those bones. There was a steep slope on the east side of the creek, so not unlike Spiderman, I scaled it and, at a height of about 10 to 12 meters spotted what appeared to be several sun-bleached fossilized bones lying on a small bench in the rock – one a vertebra about 10 centimetres in diameter. Aha! There were more rib fragments, and a larger bone protruding from the slope. They were weathering out from the rock slope in a seam which was about 15 to 20 cm thick. Ernest and I both thought that they had to be dinosaur bones. This was not "Elementary, my dear Watson" because any previous research indicated that there were no dinosaur bone beds in this part of Alberta, except some bones that were previously found in some glacial debris.

"Only the good die young..."

In the next few weeks, whenever I could, I cajoled, bribed and intimidated friends and colleagues for assistance. We drove out when school was done and began some exploratory excavating. We eventually removed hundreds of bones weighing thousands of kilograms, the location of which I carefully mapped in my trusty science go-everywhere notebook. I cleaned them and laid them out in a basement room which Doreen labeled as the "Early Cretaceous Room." She was a "blonde" and dead wrong. They turned out to be Late Cretaceous. I took some of them to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton for identification, and they were identified as authentic dinosaur bones but misidentified as hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur remains.

  

"It's been a hard day's night..."

Then began the inevitable bureaucratic red tape: an 18-month process of obtaining the proper authorization to allow me to legally conduct a dig. In the meantime, I would head out to Pipestone Creek, with volunteers or not, sometimes with my blonde wife or son Shane. We would dig for several hours, and when it was beginning to get dark I would call "time, gentlemen, please." Invariably the response was "just another fifteen minutes." Such was the almost reverent "awe" factor for those who were quite taken with being the first to touch/uncover something that had been hidden for over seventy million years.

"Memories, all alone in the moonlight..."

However, after working for more than three years, everything came to a halt when official notification arrived that my permit to excavate had been revoked. It had taken more than a year of writing dozens of letters to obtain the right to excavate, but when the Alberta Historical Resources Act was amended, I didn't qualify. Everything was crated, and transferred to the Grande Prairie Museum where it all rested and gathered much dust for several years. In 1983, Darren Tanke, a technician at the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, examined some field notes made by Dr. Philip Currie, head of dinosaur research at the Tyrrell, that described the bones as some form of horned dinosaur. I can still hear the excitement in his voice when he called me to see if he could come ‘way up north to Grande Prairie' to examine the bones, which he believed to be that of a rare pachyrhinosaurus.

"You load sixteen tons and what do you get..."

It wasn't long before excavation was begun again on what has turned out to be the second-largest dinosaur site in North America, and, it seems, a new, still-unnamed species. The process involved a semi-permanent camp, picks, shovels, crowbars, pry-bars, dental picks, screwdrivers, burlap, plaster, and even a quad – and yes, even a tow-truck.

"Pretty woman, you look lovely as can be..."

It has been three decades since the first bones were discovered, and now I can actually visit a complete life-size specimen at Grande Prairie Regional College and she is lovely to behold. In addition, there are several skull casts, one of which is at Crystal Park School, my last teaching position.

And the rest, as they say, is history.
– Al Lakusta (and his ghostwriter)

Originally published in the Fall 2004 issue of the "Wisdom" magazine, by the Grande Prairie Regional College. Published here with the permission of the author and the publisher.

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