Digging B.C. as a hot spot for ‘cool fossils’
Groan if you must, but Victoria Arbour is coming to Victoria Harbour.
“I’ve only heard that a few times,” Arbour said, laughing over the phone from Toronto.
“Yes, it’s funny. At least, I think it’s pretty funny.”
Arbour is the new curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria, starting in September. Until then, she’s off to spend the summer digging for dinosaurs.
In announcing her as the paleontologist to replace the curator of botany and earth history for the past 38 years, Richard Hebda, and the recently retired collections manager, Marji Johns, the B.C. museum called Arbour the leading expert on ankylosaurs, armourplated dinosaurs with heavy clubs for tails that roamed during the late Cretaceous, some 66-68 million years ago.
Last year, Arbour identified and named a new species of ankylosaur that was found in Montana.
Zuul crurivastator (which Arbour says means “shin destroyer” in Latin) was the third new species she has identified.
“We had a lot of fun with that one, for sure,” the 34-year-old Arbour said.
"It was a beautiful new ankylosaur skeleton. The head is really gnarly with horns on the back of it, so when my colleague David Evans and I were thinking about names, once we realized it was a new species, we threw around the idea it looked like Zuul from Ghostbusters, which we were sort of the right vintage to have grown up with.
“Once we said the name out loud, that was pretty much it. You couldn’t put it back in the box at that point. So that’s what it became.”
The Latin bit about “shin destroyer” — the tongue-tripping “crurivastator” — she had come up with earlier and was waiting for the right species to come along. A dinosaur with a giant spiked mace for a tail did nicely.
"This particular skeleton has a characteristic tail club found in these dinosaurs with weaponized tails.
“But it’s incredibly well-preserved. It’s got these incredibly sharp spikes going all the way down the tail. It’s definitely not something you would want to mess with if you were, say, a two-legged tyrannosaur trying to eat one of those little guys.”
The B.C. museum’s paleontology collection has grown from about 2,000 specimens in the late 1800s to more than 90,000 today, according to the museum. Fossils represent the fastest-growing collection in the museum and are responsible for the most new scientific papers.
The new curator, who got her doctorate at the University of Alberta and who has worked at the Royal Ontario Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University, will hunt for more.
Like the six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger in the old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Arbour decided around the age of four or five that she would like to be a paleontologist, she said.
And while she’s been in digs in dino boneyards all over the badlands and deserts of Alberta, Montana, Utah, New Mexico, Argentina and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, she’s excited to get back to Canada’s Wet Coast, with its share of lovely little unique finds: Turtles, fish, small flying reptiles, leaves, ferns, 550-million-year-old clams, and invertebrates that are only a few thousand years old.
“If you think of dinosaurs and fossils in Canada, you probably think of Alberta and Dinosaur Provincial Park,” Arbour said.
"B.C.'s fossil record is not as wellknown, but there is actually a very rich fossil record in B.C.
"The trick is that it’s up in the mountains or it’s along the coast. It’s a little bit harder to get at the fossils, because there are things like rivers and trees in the way, but the fossils are still there.
"(Royal B.C.) is a pretty well-respected museum, both within Canada and internationally. What I’m hoping to do is make it even more renowned in terms of paleontology research and find some cool fossils for them.”