Alberta boy discovers unique fossil
A young Albertan’s fossil find is helping to fill in a major knowledge gap for paleontologists.
Nathan Hrushkin, a grade seven student from Calgary, found a fossilized humerus, or arm bone, of a young hadrosaur while hiking in the badlands region of south-central Alberta.
“The first thing I said was, ‘Dad, you need to get up here!’” Hrushkin said in a media interview. “To find a real dinosaur skeleton at the age of twelve — and having it be this significant — is just really amazing.”
Hrushkin made his discovery last summer while he and his father, Dion, were hiking a portion of Horseshoe Canyon, about 120 kilometres northeast of Calgary.
“This young hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta,” said François Therrien, curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. “Nathan and Dion’s find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution.”
Better known as duck-billed dinosaurs, hadrosaurs were plant eaters that lived in all continents except Africa during the Late Cretaceous period, about 145 million to 65 million years ago.
Since Hrushkin’s discovery, paleontologists have uncovered an additional thirty to fifty bones believed to have come from a single hadrosaur that was about three or four years old at the time of its death.
While hadrosaur fossils are common to this region of Alberta, those of juvenile hadrosaurs are rare — especially from this strata layer, which paleontologists estimate is between 71 and 68 million years old. In the wake of his discovery, Hrushkin was featured in several news stories, including an appearance on American news channel CNN.
The fossil was found on land belonging to the Nature
Conservancy of Canada. “We’re happy Nathan was able to test out his skills as a budding paleontologist on our conservation site,” said Bryanne Aylward, a spokesperson for the Nature Conservancy.