This article was written by Abby
Ferrisaurus sustutensis is the first unique dinosaur species reported from British Columbia. A drawing of Ferrisaurus sustutensis, believed to be a plant eater. Curator Victoria Arbour with some of the newly exhibited dinosaur bones, which are on display until Feb. 26 at the Royal B.C. Museum.
Distantly related to triceratops but smaller and lacking the horns and armoured neck frill, ferrisaurus was about the size of a modern bighorn sheep. It weighed about 150 kilograms and lived 67 to 68 million years ago in the prehistoric redwood forests of northern B.C.
Victoria Arbour, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal B.C. Museum, and David Evans, paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum, are co-authors of the newly published description of the dinosaur they named after the area where it was found, the Sustut River basin.
Arbour said the few fossils of the creature’s bones were first collected in 1971 by a geologist working near the Sustut River, where forest clearing and blasting for a new rail line had exposed underlying rock. The geologist kept them for several years before donating them to Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
Arbour, who was interested in paleontology, examined them while at Dalhousie as an undergraduate in 2006. Recognizing them as belonging to something special, she lobbied to have them sent back to the Royal B.C. Museum.
“I just thought it made sense for the specimens to be at the provincial museum where they could be stored properly,” said Arbour. “Little did I know I would eventually make my way back here to study them in more detail.”
Before she arrived in Victoria in 2018 to take her post, Arbour did post-doctoral work at the Royal Ontario Museum. There, she met Evans, who had done his own work on leptoceratopsids, the line of dinosaurs to which the ferrisaurus belongs.
Remembering the specimens she had arranged to have transferred to the Royal B.C. Museum, Arbour raised them with Evans and the two got to work.
Arbour said she interviewed the geologist who collected them. He had good notes to identify the site where they were found, which was fortunate, since GPS was not widespread technology when he picked up the fossils.
In 2017, she led an expedition back to the Sustut area to look for more of the fossilized skeleton. No more bones were found, but pieces of a turtle shell and some fossilized plants were collected, offering clues about the creature’s habitat. “I am hoping in the future we may find a more complete skeleton of this particular dinosaur,” Arbour said.
She and Evans had concluded that one of the fossils collected in 1971 was a toe bone belonging to a ferrisaurus, based on its stubby shape and distinctive claw.
“We would sit down and take a look at the fossils, argue about them, discuss them with each other,” said Arbour. “It was really great to be able to collaborate with David. He is a very knowledgeable dinosaur person.”
Arbour then made trips to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, all of which had relatively complete skeletons of ferrisaurus species for comparison.
Extrapolating from those skeletons and working from the specimens collected in B.C., the two scientists were able to put together a likely approximation of Ferrisaurus sustutensis.
The creature is believed to have had a parrot-style beak and lived as a plant eater. But little else is known, since relatively few fossils have been collected.
“It probably walked on four legs most of the time, but might have walked on two legs some of the time,” said Arbour. “It had a short stubby tail instead of a long slender tail like some dinosaurs.
“It’s a group of dinosaurs we still don’t know an awful lot about. That’s another thing that’s pretty cool about this species.”
The fossils of the Ferrisaurus sustutensis, which Arbour has nicknamed Buster, are on display until Feb. 26 at a pocket gallery called B.C.’s Mountain Dinosaur on the main floor of the Royal B.C. Museum. The display is open to the public, free of charge.
While our neighbours to the east get a lot of attention for their dino bones, British Columbia was home to its own populations. Local paleontologists certainly know this to be the case, and they want the rest of Canada to know too.
Burgess shale
Within B.C.’s Rocky Mountains is an area rich with fossils, known as the Burgess shale. Discovered in 1909 by Charles Wolcott, then-secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, this area contains fossils that are approximately 500 million years old, and are early representatives of most modern groups, such as worms, sponges, crustaceans and jellyfish.
Discovering the elasmosaur
In the winter of 1988, two amateur dinosaur hunters brought the Comox Valley area to the attention of palaeontologists. Mike Trask and his 12-year-old daughter, Heather, were searching for fossils along the Puntledge River when they discovered a group of fossilized bones in the shale.
Palaeontologists spent months digging, and their discovery turned out to be a marine reptile known as an elasmosaur. This was the first of its kind ever found in B.C. or even west of the Rockies.
This discovery propelled the Courtenay & District Museum into the world of dinosaurs. Up until now, this had been a small community museum. But within a year of the elasmosaur being unearthed, the museum worked with the B.C. government to make the dinosaur’s location a provincial heritage site and then, along with staff and a number of volunteers, began to dig up the rest of the animal.
Today, the museum is the frontrunner in exploring the 400 million years of history on Vancouver Island.
Dinosaurs at Tumbler Ridge
In 2002, the area around Tumbler Ridge became the new epicenter for dinosaur discoveries in B.C. Prior to this, there had been only two reports of single dinosaurian skeletal elements found.
Palaeontologists from the new Peace Region Palaeontology Centre, based in Tumbler Ridge, began excavating the dinosaur remains in the summer of 2003, and they continued this work until 2005.
From this area, scientists discovered and removed over 200 isolated skeletal elements and the bones proved to be from a number of different dinosaurs – theropods, ankylosaurs and hadrosaurs – as well as other vertebrates, such as turtles, crocodiles, fish and freshwater rays.
Although the specimens were some of the oldest in western Canada (about 97 million years), the fossils were not articulated or complete.
In the summer of 2007, palaeontologists unearthed a second group of dinosaur bones within a 10-metre stretch not far from Tumbler Ridge. Over 100 kilograms of bones were collected and scientists estimated the bones to be about 75 million years old. The excavation continued and in 2009, palaeontologists estimated they were dealing with one partially articulated dinosaur, known as a hadrosaur. The dinosaur was lying on its side, and a high number of juvenile tyrannosaur teeth were found with the hadrosaur’s remains.
BC’s most complete dinosaur remains found
In 2013, after five long years of excavation on a remote hillside in B.C., near the Alberta border, palaeontologist Richard McCrea and his team had finally removed the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in the province.
The hadrosaur was estimated to be about 73 million years old and, once unearthed, was airlifted to the Tumbler Ridge Museum.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, McCrea explained there are at least two other dinosaurs in that area, based on the remains they found. His team is also still searching for the hadrosaur’s head.
McCrea said it’s likely that the hadrosaur’s head was taken by a tyrannosaurus, based on the number of tyrannosaurus teeth found with the remains.
A dinosaur highway
The most recent dinosaur discovery in B.C. took place earlier this year, in 2015, when hundreds of dinosaur footprints were found in the northeastern part of the province, near Williston Lake. The footprints are estimated to be more than 100 million years old, and they belong to different species of carnivores and herbivores. This “dinosaur highway” stretches the length of three football fields.
Palaeontologist Richard McCrea believes more digging could reveal thousands of dinosaur footprints.
Dinosaur museums in British Columbia
Within B.C., there are a couple museums you can visit to get your dinosaur fix. These include the Courtenay Museum and Palaeontology Centre, and the Dinosaur Discovery Gallery in Tumbler Ridge. Four species of dinosaurs have been discovered in the province: amblydactylus, columbosauripus, elasmosaurus and tetrapodite.
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