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The Drumheller-based paleontology museum’s latest exhibit features a preserved fossil of a triceratops skull from the late Cretaceous Period, 68 million years ago.
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Visitors to the Royal Tyrrell Museum can now get some face time with a triceratops that roamed the foothills of southwest Alberta more than 68 million years ago.
The Drumheller-based paleontology museum unveiled its latest exhibit on Thursday; a preserved fossil of a triceratops skull from the late Cretaceous Period.
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Dr. Caleb Brown, the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s curator of dinosaur systematics and evolution, said the triceratops – nicknamed ‘Calli’ – is a significant addition to the paleontology museum. While triceratops fossils are relatively common in the U.S., he noted they’re quite rare in Canada – particularly in Alberta.
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“The Royal Tyrrell Museum houses one of the most significant and largest fossil collections in the world, but until recently, we didn’t actually have an original triceratops skull,” he said. “Now we do. And it’s not just another triceratops, but the best preserved, most complete triceratops from Canada.
“It’s a spectacular specimen.”
Exhibit took nine years to come to fruition
It’s taken nearly a decade to roll out the museum’s latest prized specimen, after the fossil was originally discovered in 2014.
Brown said the skull was found during paleontological flood mitigation work conducted after the floods of 2013, when museum staff attempted to gauge potential damage to archeological sites caused by erosion exposure.
The fossil was discovered near the shoreline of Callum Creek, a tributary of the Oldman River approximately 200 kilometres south of Calgary. The triceratops’ name is in reference to that creek.
Due to Calli’s massive size and weight, Brown said the fossil was extracted in “blocks,” some of which had to be airlifted to Drumheller using a helicopter.
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Over the course of seven years, Royal Tyrrell Museum technicians worked diligently to prepare the fossil for research and public display, using air sprags (tiny air-powered jackhammers) to meticulously separate rock from bone.
Technician Ian Macdonald personally spent 6,500 hours curating the fossil, piecing it back together like a jigsaw puzzle and removing 815 kilograms of hard rock to expose the skull.
Macdonald said the sheer size of the fossil, coupled with the skull’s awkward shape, meant it took a long time to curate.
“Sometimes you’ll work on a bone and the rock pops off a nice smooth surface,” he said. “But a triceratops skull is a very gnarly and bumpy thing, so there’s a lot of bumps, pits and grooves. I had to get into each bump, pit and groove and work on it a millimetre at a time.”
One of the fossil’s most interesting characteristics is how large it is, Brown said, with the skull measuring six feet long by five feet wide.
It’s also incredibly fragile. In order to support Calli, he said the museum commissioned blacksmiths in Strathmore to forge a customized metal armature to mount it.
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Another unique attribute of the skull is that it was found in the southwest part of the province, whereas most of the museum’s fossils are discovered in the Badlands of southeast Alberta, in areas like Drumheller or Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Thanks to the geology of southwest Alberta, Brown said Calli’s fossilization resulted in a shiny black colour, compared to the muddy brown that most dinosaur fossils discovered in the southeast tend to possess. Interestingly, Brown said, Calli has a similar jet-black tint as Black Beauty – the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, which was discovered in the same region of Alberta as the triceratops.
Fossils in Focus
Calli will be the focal point of the Fossils in Focus exhibit – a temporary gallery that shows off the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s newest and most exciting specimens.
But even though Calli will be the centerpiece of the exhibit, Brown stressed there are other cool specimens that deserve attention, including the fossil of a horned dinosaur called a Pachyrhinosaurus, a slab of preserved dinosaur footprints, a crocodile skull from southern Alberta, and multiple plant fossils.
The biggest takeaway Brown hopes visitors to Drumheller have when they see Calli is how rich Alberta’s paleontological history truly is.
“Alberta has a wealth of paleontological resources, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s mandate is to protect but also collect, research and present those to the public,” he said. “This is one more iconic specimen to fill out our gallery, (showing off) the amazing fossils that Alberta has and that all Albertans can enjoy and be proud of.”
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