Bone Hunters

hundreds of millions of years ago our world looked much different from today a single landmass was home to the earliest prehistoric life forms as the land began to split apart species multiplied and adapted to their new environments along the way mass extinctions wiped out many of Earth's early inhabitants but life came back stronger than before some 200 million years ago a major extinction wiped out over half of all existing species giving rise to a new ruling class dinosaurs until the next mass extinction which destroyed nearly all dinosaur species resetting evolutionary progress once again this extinction marked the bridge between prehistory and history what came from it are the species that live today including ourselves and as we evolved we began to ask questions about our past where do we come from what came before us too many of us these questions burned with a deep desire for knowledge too even fewer these questions inspire a never-ending search for answers about our past [Music] [Music] so I think one of the reasons why I wanted to come up and work in Grand Prairie originally was because no one had ever spent a lot of time looking in this area and even just more generally in northern Canada and Wow Alberta has an amazing record when it comes to dinosaurs from the southern part of the province we don't really know what's going on very much up here in the northern part of the province [Music] [Music] so right now we're on the banks of the Wapiti River which is one of the main rivers that broadens through the area and this river is actually one of the ones that has had some of the most important finds from this area so far probably in large part because it is such a big river and so you get these nice big exposures like the ones over there that have a lot more you have a lot more opportunity to find bones and other interesting fossils simply because you can actually see them Alberta still remains one of the very best places in the entire world for dinosaurs and of course I'm more familiar with Alberta than I am with other parts of the world although I work extensively in places like Argentina Mongolia and China the wonderful thing about Alberta is that you can just walk out the back door in so many places province and you can collect dinosaurs [Music] [Music] biggest problem in the Grand Prairie area for finding fossils it's just the fact that so much of the area is covered up either by glacial deposits or by forests or by farmland and really defined dinosaurs you need rocks exposed sniffs fossils up useful [Music] it's one of those things where you come back to the same spots sometimes from year to year just because things change the water comes up it washes stuff away it exposes new stuff there might be something or I mean you may have found all the bones that were there to begin with and there's nothing else left I was hoping because I'd found something stuff but it is what it is sometimes you don't find stuff [Music] I don't think I burdens think about that Alberta is unique I think they are so spoiled because you have fossil resource which is so big and unlimited in Denmark where I come from for instance we have very few fossils and when it comes to dinosaur fossils we have barely any I think the attitude towards fossils in Alberta is different because you all pretty much have it in your backyard and therefore you think it's like that everywhere well but it isn't so I know I found stuff when I was here last time I found stuff lower down but I mean gravity only moves one way so you can at least use that to your advantage and you know look up from wherever the last fossil is that you found and hopefully you might find something however I'm not terribly confident that I am going to find very much more here because I don't see anything else another problem in this area is just the fact where you do have river valleys very often the river valleys have very steep cliffs on the walls and as the dinosaurs erode out essentially they break up and pieces fall to the bottom of the cliff but even if you find the skeleton then you also have a cliff above you with a lot of rock that's gonna have to be moved so these these are all sort of logistic problems that can be resolved but not without expense there's tons of fossils that we know of from anecdotal evidence from over the past hundred years of dinosaurs being found in the Grand Prairie region so we know the dinosaurs are here it's just it's a matter of putting in time to actually find the specimens and and find these fossils so we can actually tell what life was like 75 million years ago around this area there's a fossil it's actually a big chunk of petrified wood you can tell that this is a chunk of a tree because you can actually see all of the lines in there just like you would see on a tree that you find today trees have these growth rings in them trees had growth rings 75 million years ago as well think I'm gonna take this back actually it's actually a useful it'll actually be a useful teaching specimen for the class that I teach at the college here they want to know when they find a funny-looking Rock if it's a funny-looking Rock or if it's a fossil so being able to bring in as much as much material into the class is actually really really useful try to be able to tell what isn't isn't a fossil is it's a bit of a hurt it takes takes a long time to be able to figure that out well to be able to know well which which ones are which ones aren't fossils and that's why you get a lot of people coming in to museums that bring in rocks that they think are fossils participa because they look like something but it's not actually a fossil it's just a rock with shape [Music] so this is a chunk of some kind of dinosaur my problem is is that it's a small piece so I don't actually know what it is beyond that it's a bone and that it's big enough that sort of the only thing that it probably would have come from is a dinosaur so yeah I mean like I say the fossil what it's from other than a dinosaur I don't know but I mean we know there's stuff around here because there's this and there's the stuff that I found nearby here a couple weeks ago that I can find it fairly easily whether I'm gonna find anything that's actually significant or that can tell me anything more than there were dinosaurs in this area is you know always a little bit of a of an unknown essentially what you have to imagine that Alberta was like in terms of climate it was sort of like northern Florida is today it wasn't tropical so people have that idea that that that one's wrong and what we know now actually is that dinosaurs probably did not like tropical regions anyway because in tropical regions which became very hot it was harder for dinosaurs to find a comfortable temperature when we look at Grand Prairie 75 million years ago we were much closer to the Arctic Circle which means that the sunlight and the amount of light during different times of the year was going to be very different as well there was a huge Inland Sea which would have led to a much greater amount of precipitation I think it's really interesting to look at just the vast array of animals and plants and everything else in the ecosystem to try and understand how these ancient environments would have actually worked well Grand Prairie is a difficult place look for fossils but there's simply left exposure and that means that the amount of time and money and sweat and tears required to find a nice dinosaur or a nice specimen of any fossil vertebrae is just a little higher in this part of the province well the significance of the Philip J curry dinosaur museum here in Wembley I think is tremendous for paleontology in the Grand Prairie area I did northern Alberta in general it provides a focal point for display of fossils for research on fossils it provides a place where fossils can be deposited after being collected in the field and just a venue for really showcasing the region's tremendous paleontological richness back in the year 2000 collected a duck-billed dinosaur and found more dinosaur footprints and I just realized just how good the area was so we started intensifying our interest in the area realizing that if we didn't do it nobody else was going to do it so along with the local amateurs people at the Grand Prairie Regional College and so on we started at a more aggressive program that started turning up more and more material and basically once you got the ball rolling it's like a snowball going down a hill it just picks up more and more momentum and now we finally reach the stage where I would love to have been in the late 1970s already the Pipestone bone bed is the site where we find enormous numbers of the horned dinosaur packy rhinosaurus a bone bed is simply a geological deposit where fossil bones are concentrated and in this case it appears to be a site where a herd of Pocky rhinosaurus somehow met its demise we don't know exactly what happened it could have been a flooding event for example that killed all these individuals there's another tarp underneath actually that's half buried and then that's going to be it's sitting directly on top of the bones that we left exposed last year so we're going to get that off today and start excavating those bones Pipestone Creek was an area that was discovered in fact by a high school teacher alla Costa back in 1974 we came up to Grand Prairie to good hard look at Pipestone Creek ball ban which we realized was richer than anything we had in the southern part of the province so we were pretty excited about it [Music] the the concentration of bones of ament's there can be a couple of hundred in a square meter if you work through the entire thickness of the deposit so it's an incredibly productive source of horn dinosaur fossils predominantly just Pocky rhinosaurus individuals of different ages you're gonna make it a little bit more debris and then you can sweep that away as necessary it's a little bit wet which is unfortunate but yeah just keep an eye on things and you can do that over here too to try to just dig around the bones so that we can have them really really well defined and then once we can see them the outlines of them really well then I'll get in and we need to map them okay the site is at least the size of a football field we've actually taken rock samples at at the site and so we know it goes into the hill by 50 meters and is at least 100 meters long and we've never found the end of it we're definitely going to be digging for for a long time but we only excavate about two to three meters square meters per year and so the rate is is quite slow but I could definitely see us doubling the size of the quarry over the next several years well pollen ology is not at random we usually make a section and then we collect samples throughout that section it might be a member in a formation or it might be a whole formation that we collect but for macro fossils like leave fossils and twigs and flowers and so on it's a matter of finding the right areas where there are chances of finding that and that is pure look my job right now is I'm going through looking at the field IDs and then looking at the bone itself and seeing if I agree with the field ID because we have the volunteers we can pull out a lot more material but it doesn't mean that the identification isn't always gonna be right so those of us that are in the fields knowing how to identify stuff we try to help out as much as possible but there's always gonna be stuff that even a trained eye won't be able to identify in the field so this one is supposedly a valence so that's one of the bones that make up the fingers judging by the size it probably belongs to the foot and not the hand fossils are one-of-a-kind resource once they're destroyed or erosion has weathered them away you can't get them back again so really the importance of a paleontological museum is to get those fossils out of the fields get them inside protect them from the elements and preserve them for future generations any of these fossils are irreplaceable and that's really I feel the key importance of a museum is to preserve our natural heritage it's a museum that in fact is pushing research locally it's working on public education it's working towards preserving the fossils on a local basis it's also an economic generator for the region before this museum was built there wasn't really anywhere for fossils or paleontology to be discussed in the area at least not in a really big and kind of interesting way by having a museum here in the area the people of the area are able to see all of the really interesting things that are lying beneath their feet and as a paleontologist I think it's really helpful too because it's brought a lot of attention to the fact that there are so many fossils in this area and just the very presence of the museum being here has meant that there are now more people going out and looking for fossils in the local area and what that means is more eyes on the ground and the more people you have looking for fossils the more fossils you're going to find so we're going down to the Red Willow River specifically we're going down to the area where the Red Willow falls is people have been finding bones here for decades but it was only really within the last maybe ten years I'd say that a lot more material has been found things that are actually identifiable and that can tell us what actually was living here beyond just it being another dinosaur the area itself is also pretty unique in that it preserves a lot of soft tissues in particular skin impressions from dinosaurs mainly herbivorous duck-billed hadrosaurs dinosaurs and so with a place like this where you're finding lots of really interesting skin impressions they can actually tell you a lot about even species that we thought we knew fairly well so animals like hadrosaurs we've known about them for centuries at this point but you know we're still finding out all sorts of new information about what they actually looked like on the outside not just what their bones [Music] [Music] [Music] but I've been meaning to get this thing for the last four weeks I should've known what I was out here before [Music] and I know that by next spring the water will be so high that it would have washed it away so if I didn't grab it now it would have been gone probably before the next time I would get out [Applause] [Music] I can't feel my toes [Music] oh yeah okay it might just look like a big chunk of coal at first but what it actually is is most of a fossilized tree so so obviously there would have been more of it coming off this way and this way if we take this back and we cut it into sections which is probably what we're going to do with it you can actually really see the different growth lines that are in the tree itself and we can use that to try and understand a little bit more about climate and its temperature and what the environment was like 75 million years ago when this tree got buried it was and [Music] I think when you go out you know that you won't always find something very cool and you're just really happy when you do find something that is reasonably well preserved and and good looking and something you can work with and yes you do know that you are not finding everything there is to be found as a paleontologist with the training we have we know we won't find everything but we will find a good amount and and we are we are satisfied when we have luck [Music] to be able to understand both where we come from and where we're headed to when we talk about all of the enormous changes that are going on in the world around us today with climate change and the melting coals these are things that have actually happened in the ancient past on more than one occasion and so by looking to the ancient past and the fossils of the past we can get a better understanding of just how the environments and the animals living in those environments have responded to these massive changes in their ecosystems we might not have a very good understanding of where we are going right now and without fossils we wouldn't even know that things like extinctions exist [Music] those satellite images in general provide us a really good glimpse of at least what we might find when we go out there and it can tell us where we can find exposed rock and that exposed rock is where we need to go to look for fossils Yeah right here sometimes it might not be possible to access an area by by Road or overland in anyway so we may have to think about where are the access points by canoe or by jet boat in some cases when we're working in much harder to access areas much more remote areas we may have to think about using things like helicopters or other air support it's gonna be damp in the spots here obviously I gotta find the location okay trying to figure out where exactly this thing is is like kind of an art more than a science half the time Jericho charcoal and what looked like a tiny bit of a fossil but I don't know where the other half of the tiny bit of a fossil is so I think it's really important that we go out and we collect these fossils because this is the only record we have of what life was like on this planet for the last 500 million years and further back with that a number of bones from a single species of dinosaur and while that bone bed can tell us an incredible amount about that one animal it doesn't really tell us a lot about the other animals that we're living in the same area at the same time and so we really need to search out these different areas to get a fuller picture of what the landscape was like what kind of animals were interacting with each other basically you can kind of think of the fossil record as telling you a story sometimes you get an entire page that's very very detailed with what's going on but if all you ever do is look at that same page over and over again you'll never be able to understand what the complete story actually is this this is something I don't know what but it's something yeah hey this is more something it's you know there's bits of bone here doing right it's but when I break it it looks that much more spectacular that's right just spit up so the tendons are generally strong enough but it very least it's it's another fossil and it says that yes there are for sure - ores at this locality and it's something that's at least identifiable versus just a chunk of random [Music] [Music] what about I get this phone call around noon Lily Mac we found a full skull the pleats go that's awesome news how are you gonna get it out we haven't figured that part out yeah I'll grab my canoe I'll be down there and you know 45 minutes or so paddle down by myself and better than here and we just through the scope in the canoe and paddled it the rest of the way down because otherwise hauling that skull out of here up a cliff through the bush would have taken us probably the better part of a full day the body block was a little bit different a helicopter day you said you'd move a fossil for us if I called you join up of a fossil oh yeah sure can I meet you guys there at 4 o'clock this afternoon yes absolutely [Music] [Music] so this is actually I'm pretty sure this is actually part of the hadrosaur right here there were bones still going into the hillside so when the large body block so the the plot with all the various limbs and ribs and this kind of thing when that block was taken out there was still this bone going into the hillside [Music] certainly this tedious work and you have to have the right mindset I think but it is enjoyable the best part is of course seeing the specimen unveiled as you go and see these bits of bone and pieces of anatomy that have been you know trapped in the rock for 70 million years and being the first one to see it as it's coming out of the rock very very cool and you start with the bigger equipment and you work your way smaller and smaller as you get closer to it so by the time we're down but the the bones surface were in fact using dental tools in most cases including just dental picks needles and a lot of that work ends ends up being done in the lab of course with microscopes so trying to prepare big dinosaur with needles it's a challenge [Music] this is an important specimen for a few different reasons number one it's an articulated skull which is fairly rare from northern Alberta and we were very excited about that because number one skulls are great to find number two look like a small skull and number three from what we could see of the shape of it it looked like it might actually be a new species that we hadn't seen up in Grand Prairie before so to date in the Grand Prairie area we haven't found any crested hadrosaurs all we found are the ones in the fields we could see what looked like a crest on this and now as it's being prepared it looks like it's got a crest so this is a first for the Grand Prairie area a lamby asourian hadrosaur which is a crested header sorry fossil record basically what it suggested in Alberta told say 20 or 30 years ago was that everything that lived here pretty much were big and gigantic and that's because of the fact that the complete skeletons are the big animals the ones that are the most showy specimens small things you've got to work a lot harder so we're always happy when we find good skeletons of small dinosaurs like the one that Robyn's working on so finally after a lot of preparation and quite a lot of time spent on the specimen it's at a stage where it's a bone as prepared as it's gonna be the head tells us a lot about what this animal is so we can get a lot of good information from the features that we can see now that it's finally prepared we have lots of good stuff that we can look at the entire head is here and we actually have parts of the neck as well going up to the base of the skull so we have the lower jaw here and sort of the upper part of the head here this is the duckbill be crate here this little bag here with a sort of flattened area there we have the eye socket right here or the I would be sitting and these little bones kind of squished up in a little pile here or actually parts of bone that surround the ID called a sclerotic ring and it actually supports the eyeball in the living animal because this is a complete skull and a juvenile animal it will likely be an important specimen for other researchers to come visit it will likely be a part of a lot of different research projects for researchers around the world however we still need to do the research to describe the rest of the body of this animal and that will be part of ongoing research that will happen in the next few years [Music] towards the front of the jacket here where the front the animal would be it's a little more articulated and that makes sense because the head was just to the side here and quite close by and it was articulated so it seems like towards the front of the animal the head and the neck and sort of the chest area it's a little more articulated now as we go further back it seems a little less articulated the bones have been jumbled up and kind of sloshed around so they're no longer in the life positions that they would have been in the animal as it was living well I'll finish up with this this week and I'm off we're actually living in a Golden Age of dinosaur collecting right now it's a time period when there's more funding available than never has been in the past there is more money available but of course like anything else you're competing for money and so it's a problem with paleontology because very often you don't have the results until you've done the work how can you prove that you're going to have results if in fact you haven't done the work yet so how do you get the money that's going to allow you to do it so it is a catch-22 problem [Music] right now we're sitting in the dinosaur discovery gallery in peace region paleontology Research Center in tumbler Ridge and our museum has been shut down since the end of March due to funding cuts getting the resources to to do the exploration and also to do the to do the field work the research it's a challenge for most paleontologists people have this idea that all paleontologists are well funded and not true there's very few that I know that that are are not struggling in one asked one way or another and the reason that a lot of people equate Alberta with Dinosaurs is because Alberta has actually invested in its fossil heritage and they've deemed it important enough to put money towards it really there's nothing that is more important in my mind than being responsible stewards for our heritage this is the story of where we came from as a species as a planet this is the story of where we could possibly go as organisms it's the presence may be the key to the past but the past lets us know what's possible what has happened and what could potentially happen and if we don't properly care and protect and respect the representation of that story which are the fossil heritage in which is natural heritage in general then we're going to lose that story and we're going to lose a huge part of what makes us us [Music] so doing work in northern Canada and really anywhere remote in Canada is logistical II very difficult and often quite expensive it's always a bit of a difficult thing to do trying to put together big complicated projects in areas that are hard to access and never really being entirely sure if you're going to be able to have the funding to be able to pull it off keep your eyes out for bears I've looked at around here and look kind of from pretty prime bear country right along the way along the edge of the river here so [Music] for never having been here before at least this looks promising there's areas that have not yet been explored that do have the potential to tell us more about the lives of dinosaurs and other animals that were alive during the Cretaceous but you don't know unless you go out and look and the going out and looking is the exciting part [Music] the fact is that paleontology is one of the best ambassadors for Sciences and so it gets a lot of people interested and it's an approachable science and gets people interested in the sciences and maybe they not they're not going to go into paleontology but it might make people that were a little reticent about going into Sciences you know actually I think hey I might be able to do this what keeps me excited about working in the region is the amount of work that's still left to do so if it's 50 what if we did is like we can come down to D is dr. gates there's a lot I wanna hear me [Music] head over to nose mouth and nose Greek oh noes Creek and Wapiti there's a fair bit of exposure on the east side yep so that we can get the exposed rock so you want to get to the base just follow us [Music] get up over this way and see what I can find them what's most exciting for me is still being able to go out and find something new knowing that there's all sorts of new things to still be found out the really fun thing about paleontology is that it's not done there is still a ton of work to be done and that we actually are finding more new dinosaurs now than at any point in the past these clay of rip up class are actually a good thing to look for and can sometimes tell you that there might be fossils in this area and obviously there is fossils in this area those fossils by the looks of it all around this layer in this block right in here is what looks like a tooth of something like a Tyrannosaurus Taranis or maybe I'll protists or something like that probably not trans source Rex but somehow I have to figure out how to chip it off the bottom of this block without dropping it and breaking it if you look extremely closely right in there you can see the impressions from the serrations on the tooth it's definitely a dinosaur tooth hey guys I think I found something else over here I I won't know I will guarantee it no we're looking at a woman actually a literal ton of bone here for this like 20 meters I can I can see fossils everywhere in this 20 meters right here so to give you a bit of context okay so I can see I can see this is a bone all in here this is about going in here this is above the way out here this is another one coming out here this is one here this is a different one here this is very very rare I have never found a bone bed like this wow this is probably gonna be the big project that we're gonna be working on this year based on the volume of material that I see I think there's no reason why this can't be why this can't be just as productive and abundant as as Pipestone this is this is a Taranis or - I didn't see this before I just saw this right now so I might try and take this out it's small enough that I can probably pop it out even if it comes out in a couple pieces it looks like it'll go back together easily enough this is just Oh of stuff there is so much stuff here and it's so much if it is just right at the surface just waiting to be this is a bone this is a bone there's more bones there's bones and more bones and always more bones this is definitely a Tyrannosaur tooth based on the size the fact that you've got these serrations coming down like that I have ever found a boat bed this dense this rich now the only problem is like with most things how do we get it out of here for this whole this whole femur or whatever kind of bone it is so we're talking about animals that are probably you know two three tons sort of small small elephant sized and super exciting but if you were to come back here for a week and just kind of like hang out and dig up the bones whereas while how I talked your trip the finding something like we did today that's really where the helicopter shines is being able to get us in to places that we've never been to before to look at rocks that we've never seen ever before and then finding something that awesome that dense that diverse that was something that was just leaves me not with very many words left to say [Music] obviously if there's a lot more water today than it was a week and a half ago [Music] I think we can keep toys [Music] [Music] getting the path down here cleared and marked out now means that we can not have to worry about wasting our time finding a path down there was no water flowing through here whatsoever because we we crossed right here like I went across the river right there but I don't want to like try and go across that and just end up like drags you know half mile downstream it's been raining for last few days so the waters come up quite a bit and actually the foam bed the bone bed layer itself is just covered probably the first few inches is now covered by water you can see the black layer and right near the base of the black layer is where most of the fossils are coming at it there are a few a little bit higher as well but obviously even if we got a cross through what's a bit of a raging torrent right now it would still be pretty hard to actually do anything because everything would be under a few inches of water with the water the way it is we didn't get to really work on the bone bed itself we decided to take a bit of a walk on the side that we could get to check out the check out the exposures that we could at least get to today we found more fossils so it's a pretty good sign that there's that many bones still all close together you know in good condition next time we come back we probably gonna have to come and check this spot out as well [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: STORYHIVE

Views: 106,469

Rating: 4.7948718 out of 5

Keywords: storyhive, british columbia, alberta, local film, documentaries, dinosaurs, fossils, badlands, grande prairie, paleontology, t-rex, raptor, northern alberta, rocky mountains

Id: -9s1ccMs8Uw

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018