It's been a successful season for dinosaur excavation, bringing total skull discoveries in the Pipestone Creek/Wapiti River fossil bonebeds to 29. "We got two very nice (Wapiti bed) skulls. One we took out, one we didn't because it was just too far into the cliff," world-renowned paleontologist Dr. Philip Currie of Edmonton said. Currie, along with his team which includes his wife, palaeobotanist Dr. Eva Koppelhus, and members of the Grande Prairie Regional College, airlifted the skull along with other larger fossils from the Wapiti bonebed Friday, ending the team's three-week summer work. Twelve pachyrhinosaurus skulls have been found at the Wapiti bed and 17 at the better-known Pipestone Creek site south of Wembley over the last several years. And Currie thinks they've discovered a different classification of the dinosaur. "I'm still highly suspicious that these are in fact pachyrhinosaurus canadensis, the first (of its kind) that was ever described, near Lethbridge (about 1950)," he said.

 

The eight-metre-long, four-tonne adult dinos unearthed at Pipestone have been classed as p. lakustai, for discoverer Al Lakusta of Grande Prairie who stumbled on the bonebed in 1972. "For us to find it (p. canadensis) up here it's pretty exciting because it increases the range. We felt for a long time that these dinosaurs were probably migratory … and given the fact that the corridor for them moving is north-south then it's likely that they were moving up into the Arctic." It's hard to prove this point, Currie said, because of the known northern species of the 70 million-year-old Cretaceous-era beast. "Now that we have a much bigger range ... then there's exciting possibilities to look at isotopes in the bone for example and see in fact if they were moving north and south," he said. But it'll take years to confirm this. "Unfortunately in paleontology nothing happens overly fast," he said. The Wapiti bed skull retrieved will take a year or so to prepare in a laboratory, but they'll also need more than just the one. "For us to determine what species it is we do need a couple of good skulls so we can look at the range of variability," he said. "(We look at) how different are the males to the females?

 

How different are the old animals from the young animals kind of thing?" He expects to find many more fossils in both bonebeds, but it typically takes longer at the Wapiti location, about 30 kilometres west of the Pipestone site. "This is not as easy as a bonebed to work with as Pipestone. (It's) more remote, more difficult to get to and the rock is very, very hard," he said. "Pipestone is a place where we can work much faster and see results faster, but really we need the information from both places. "It's a fantastic opportunity for us to be able to compare very closely-related species in the same geographic area." Gathering the specimens is important, but so is mapping the geographic area they're found in, Currie added. "That helps us interpret the environment they were living in up till the point of death," he said. "It helps us determine how they were buried. "It helps us determine things like climate through the analysis of the plant fossils and the other fossils that are in the same area as the Ceratopsian (horned herbivore) dinosaurs. It helps us determine which way the rivers were in fact running and how big the rivers were." After the bones were removed, there was still lots of work to be done.

 

The group laid down plastic to cover the layer to make it easier to rediscover where they'd dug and chipped at the cliff's side. "On the last day what we do is clear everything out and make sure that everything is covered up so there's nothing visual that anyone would be offended by," he said. "We've restored the bonebed as natural as we can and we'll leave it for next year now. Next year we'll be back to reopen it again and go to the next section." Currie is unsure when they'll be back, but he said it'll likely be around the same time. "It's over (for this season). It went awfully fast. I can't believe it, but we were very successful and I'm very happy with the results." josephine@dailyheraldtribune.com