on the scale of small to huge, today's discovery was ginormous!!!
it started when me and tony went exploring the old monarch coal mine site.
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in his usual fashion, tony acted as a super strong "fossil magnet", and found a really good fossil spot. it turned out to be a bonebed that contained at least one (but possibly MORE) tyrannosaurid(s), as opposed to the usual duckbill contents of drumheller bonebeds!
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meaning despite the fact i'd launched this expedition, it was tony who'd made our huge discovery... and that i wasn't really needed.
i'd matched up all the modern landmarks with the ones from the 1913 photo. funny enough despite the difference in angle, my head is covering up the same section of hills that francis slate is standing in front of in his era. you can also see the spot he is digging on to my right.
darren was concerned for the condition of the bones at the surface. "the museum will definitely do a thorough excavation on this site soon, but we don't want the already exposed bones suffering any more damage. especially if this bed has been heavily eroded in 96 years, we might have lost a lot of bones to erosion since slate was here!" so he pulled out a bottle of glue.
we spent the next 20 minutes carefully pouring a few coats of adhesive glue onto the bones to help hold them together, and strengthen them against the erosional elements...
though sadly not all the (exposed) bones were in great shape. i glued this one as best i could, but there wasn't a lot of it left sadly.
or at least that was till i looked up from the ground...
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not to downplay tony's find, for after all is was an amazing find, but suddenly my own discovery took his huge find and turned it into a ginormous one! a find tony won't have made without me... meaning it was a real team effort!
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looking up at the badlands around me, the funny feeling i'd seen them before. which was impossible. i'd never been to the monarch site before...
this puzzled me for a minute, until till i realized it didn't seem familiar in the sense that i'd been here before. rather i'd simply seen this somewhere before...
this puzzled me for a minute, until till i realized it didn't seem familiar in the sense that i'd been here before. rather i'd simply seen this somewhere before...
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then it hit me. it was from a photo i'd seen, a photo i had a copy of in my pocket!!!
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this photo right here...
one of two men; eli hexton (holding the camera) and francis slate (swinging the pick axe), taken in 1913. it is the sole record of this they worked 96 years ago, but back then they suspected contained multiple albertosaurs.
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the sole purpose of my whole search across the red deer river valley was to find more sites of this the most elusive fossil hunter of the great canadian dinosaur rush, francis slate... which i had just done...
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i'd found a lost quarry of francis slate!!!
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take a close look at this photo from 1913 then scroll back up to the picture of me in the present, and see if you can tell how i figured out i was in the right spot. don't cheat and look at the next picture!
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now sadly i was sooooo excited about all this that my attempt at taking the modern version of the slate photo didn't turn out (i was so hyper that i couldn't hold the camera still, and they all turned out blurry...). however the one photo of me looking at the site has all the clues you need to ID the site...
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if you are having trouble (which isn't helped by my modern photo having a slightly different angle) than here is how i did it.
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i'd matched up all the modern landmarks with the ones from the 1913 photo. funny enough despite the difference in angle, my head is covering up the same section of hills that francis slate is standing in front of in his era. you can also see the spot he is digging on to my right.now a lot of the detail won't be clear in a small version of the diagram, so you'll want to look at a larger version. i can never tell if blogger will allow my pictures to be enlarged by clicking. if it doesn't work for you, here is a link to mega large version of this comparison diagram.
i couldn't wait till the end of the day to report this. we immediately went back to the tyrrell museum and grabbed the lost quarry expert, darren tanke, to show him what we'd just discovered.
getting back to the site, and showing him, darren turned to me "you've turned out to be quite the pupil traum," he complemented me comparing the photo to the skyline. "i never would have thought anyone could go from learning the basics of how to find a lost quarry and then go track down a slate locality a only a few days! even i have had trouble finding slate digs!!!"
if i was a mammal i'd have blushed at being complimented by the legendary tanke. good thing i'm not a mammal!
if i was a mammal i'd have blushed at being complimented by the legendary tanke. good thing i'm not a mammal!
darren then turned his attention to the tony side of our discovery. the obvious remains of an albertosaur. most obvious of all were these two teeth.
at first glance a palaeontologist could dismiss these as simply evidence of albertosaur scavenging on the bonebed. after all meat eating dinosaurs shed teeth all the time (and 3 out 5ish bonebeds tend to have theropod teeth if you look hard enough!).
at first glance a palaeontologist could dismiss these as simply evidence of albertosaur scavenging on the bonebed. after all meat eating dinosaurs shed teeth all the time (and 3 out 5ish bonebeds tend to have theropod teeth if you look hard enough!).
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however that top tooth wasn't your ordinary tooth. you'll notice compared to the bottom one it is way bigger, and is thicker. that is because the top tooth still had its root attached. which either meant this albertosaur was REALLY sick or injured while alive, and thus lost tooth and root (as normally roots stayed in the jaw to be reabsorbed when a tooth feel out... no point in wasting all that energy), OR it had fallen out after the albertosaur had died (which was a LOT more likely as the soft tissue holding the rooted tooth in the jaw decomposed...).
darren was very excited by this find.
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of all the slate quarrys around the drumheller area (slate operated in over a dozen areas of western canada from what we can gather) this was the one darren had most wanted found. it was not only one of francis slate's first recorded operations, but one on a find that could be of enormous scientific importance still today!
it also excited darren as it reminded him of the lost barnum brown albertosaur bonebed that he'd relocated in 1997. "the best of times," darren assured me and tony in a fond recollection, that this site clearly stirred.
it also excited darren as it reminded him of the lost barnum brown albertosaur bonebed that he'd relocated in 1997. "the best of times," darren assured me and tony in a fond recollection, that this site clearly stirred.
darren was concerned for the condition of the bones at the surface. "the museum will definitely do a thorough excavation on this site soon, but we don't want the already exposed bones suffering any more damage. especially if this bed has been heavily eroded in 96 years, we might have lost a lot of bones to erosion since slate was here!" so he pulled out a bottle of glue. we spent the next 20 minutes carefully pouring a few coats of adhesive glue onto the bones to help hold them together, and strengthen them against the erosional elements... though sadly not all the (exposed) bones were in great shape. i glued this one as best i could, but there wasn't a lot of it left sadly.`
darren assured me he was confident that there'd be more bones under the surface. those unknown bones, having been protected from the harsh conditions, would be in pristine condition we the museum came out to uncover them. hopefully then darren and the museum's palaeontologists would be able to confirm if this was the multiple albertosaur bonebed slate had claimed it was (and thus possibly further evidence of pack hunting in tyrannosaurids), or something else entirely.
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as we concluded this rather epic day, and headed back towards the car, i turned to darren. "how does it feel? you know when you find a lost quarry?"
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"what do you mean?" he asked totally puzzled.
it was hard to describe the feeling welling through me right then.
it was hard to describe the feeling welling through me right then.
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i think darren thought i was boasting or something, but that certainly wasn't it... no, but how to describe it?
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in desperation i turned back to the quarry one last time, and gazing on that single spot it hit me...
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just over there, two men had toiled away on the same mysteries that drew me out here a century later... yet if not for my efforts (or darren's for the hundred plus similar sites his relocated) their part in this massive scientific drama would have been long forgotten... which to me would be a tragedy. afterall i don't want people to forget what i've done after i'm gone...
"you know, the feeling of being... connected, connected to the fossil explorers of old," i started my attempt to explain. "slate and hexton have been gone a long time, and though we never met, it now somehow feels like i knew them..."
darren had an intent, i thought i wasn't making sense so kept talking. "you know, not like i knew who they were from reading a book, but i actually knew them from, at least a moment of, their lives. i haven't just seen a spot where they worked here today, i've touched something that was pivotal to who they were... suddenly i've shared in, and more like helped them in, one of the greatest adventures and discoveries that they ever had. just from find this spot again after so long!"
darren now had a soft look on his face, and after a moments pause. "yeah i have had that feeling a few times, come to think of it," he winked at me, as a big smile came to his face while we walked back to the parking lot out of the past and reemerged into the present...
taking my own look, tony certainly had found "something". it was a 
which with the two teeth so close together in front of me (with a 
this one from 1913. a picture from the geologic 
this the FIRST of 
another from 1912, but 3 weeks after the last report. in this slate discoveries a "radically" new form of 
the last of the 1912 photos. this is one of only instances we know slate to have collected something himself... the weird part he doesn't tell us what it is though... 
my last photo is a big one in 
for as of right after i publish this post people of the 
now as i was about to learn from the master, i didn't want to miss anything, so i made sure i took really thorough notes. though with a brain as small as mine, and such limited arms there were a few points i made 
to begin with what is a lost quarry? 
these labels on the back of some dig photos should give you a good idea of just how detailed location records were of these early fossil hunters.
lets say you narrowed down our "east of sand creek" specimen to this specific hill in the badlands. in modern palaeontology for us to gain everything we can from the fossil we need to know the exact layer it was found in the hill.
due to 
for lost 
a tell tale sign of a dig for a unknown mystery quarry, is the left over bits of the materials needed to get fossils out of the ground. things like this pictured scrap of plaster in burlap smothered that didn't quite make it onto the field jacket (it happens all the time), wood timbers used as props and supports, and even sometimes digging tools. 
back during the great dinosaur rush the only way to keep track of the greater world outside the badlands was by newspaper. so field crews were sure to stock up on them during supply runs. also back in those days the number of paper products available was much more limited then today. so newspaper had to be used for EVERYTHING. whether it be for use in field 
the last thing that often turns up while hunting lost and mystery 
without a method though, all this stuff i just listed would be, well, just that. a bunch of stuff. i won't have been able to tell you much with it... 
despite the fact that most of the photographs darren is looking at are nearly a century old, you might think a lot has changed since then. however it turns out throughout the ages one constant is the land. granted it has undergone a 100 years worth of erosion since it was pictured, this change fortunately at moment (a 1000 years from now might be a very different story!) is only superficial...
though slightly less defined or tall, the key landmarks remain the same today! don't believe me compare this picture with the one above...
he also sometimes gets ubber lucky, and will find an object captured in one of his lost quarry photographs. when this happens, like this glue bottle he found in several pieces, it makes it ridiculously easy for him to confirm a site.
if you thought photographs and garbage told us a lot, they have nothing on newspaper. sometimes ALL darren needs is a tiny scrap of newspaper like the one picture here (ACTUAL SIZE... seriously that small!!!), and he can solve the toughest of mystery quarrys. mind you i said sometimes.
while out in dinosaur park, darren and company stumbled across this old quarry. you can partially tell by the unnatural slump in the hill, even if the erosion of 90 years has made it look natural! well okay that, and more obviously there was a bunch of eroded lumber scattered around in front of it. 
looking around the base of the hill he found these little bits of newspaper... 
darren also found this broken chunk of a gas canister. here was something he could work with right away in the field!
for you see, in a previous lost quarry case darren had found a more complete example (dare i say... specimen! isn't this eerily like talking about a fossil find) of such a canister. thus he knew the brand, and more to the point the exact production model!
that's where the newspaper came in. however this was one of the trickiest newspapers darren had ever encountered. it wasn't from any of the usual places. meaning either he'd have to somehow figure out which paper it was from or be forced to randomly search every newspaper outside the normal places' from 1914 (which is every city and town on earth minus 5-6!!!)... so its a good thing he knew the year than right, you're thinking.
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which of course darren could tell were the toe bones of a ceratopsian dinosaur (ceratopsians are darren's favourite dinosaurs!).
a quick reference of the american museum of natural history's collections manifests revealed to darren that for the 1914 field season barnum had a good haul of horned dinosaurs. meaning his year ID was holding up solid, but that he was spoiled for choice on which exact ceratopsian's dig site he'd found...
a rather lovely centrosaurus skull.
this rather lovely centrosaurus skeleton. nearly complete from head to toe... which was the problem for darren. complete from head to toe. it had toe bones. this skeleton apart from some vertebrae was complete.
