Petrified stump at root of new display
Giant specimen found along Athabasca River
It was elk Don and Julia Waddell were after that fall day on the Athabasca River.
What they thought at first was a large boulder along the banks turned out to be far more interesting: the biggest petrified stump to be discovered in Alberta.
On Friday, the Royal Alberta Museum put the massive stump on display, sharing what experts know so far about the find: that it was a conifer tree that took root 60 million to 65 million years ago, shortly after dinosaurs became extinct.
“When you find something of this magnificence, it’s just incredible,” Alberta Culture Minister Heather Klimchuk said Friday after looking at the stump, a craggy mixture of brown, grey and silver that looks like a miniature mountain up close.
“I look at this piece as perhaps a cornerstone of the new Royal Alberta Museum,” she said.
Petrified wood, made of minerals such as quartz, became Alberta’s official stone in 1977. Small pieces are routinely found throughout the province.
But there’s nothing routine about a stump like this.
It is about two metres wide and nearly a metre tall and weighs in at 6,690 pounds. The Valley Zoo’s Lucy the elephant, for comparison, weighs about 9,000 pounds.
The stump’s size, and the fact that it was found on the treed shoreline of the Athabasca River south of Fox Creek, made it a challenging project for the experts who had to move it.
Darren Tanke, a museum technician with the Royal Tyrrell Museum who has collected about 8,000 fossils, described it as was one of the most memorable recovery missions in his more than three decades of work.
“The thing that really appealed to me was it was so big, so heavy and so remote,” he said.
Tanke and Melissa Bowerman, the Royal Alberta Museum’s assistant curator of geology, explained it took many steps, and a large cast of characters, to get the stump off the soggy riverbank and into the museum.
Ultimately, the project required the design of a large, specially crafted wooden barge.
The barge was tipped into the water to allow the stump to be slowly hauled onto the floating platform once its base was dug out of the muck. They also had to build a custom sling and winches for the hauling.
Experts are still working to figure out exactly what kind of a tree the stump was from, but Bowerman said it may be a metasequoia, similar to the giant redwoods on the west coast today.
In addition to its size, the stump is interesting because its rings, although distorted, are clearly visible. Bowerman noted there are pockets of agate that have a natural beauty.
“It doesn’t have teeth and claws, but it has the connection people can identify with,” Bowerman said of the stump.
After snapping a few photos with the petrified stump on the river bank in October 2011, the Waddells, who live west of Stony Plain, posed for more pictures in front of the stump’s display case Friday.
They said it took them months to realize how significant the find had been.
Caked in a layer of mud, “It looked more like a rock than a tree,” Don Waddell said. “Going by in a boat or a canoe, you wouldn’t have given it a second glance.”
But they did share their pictures with friends and family.
“Everyone was amazed, but of course, none of us really understood what we had discovered,” Julia Waddell wrote in a description of their experience that she shared with the Journal.
Finally, in the spring, during a trip to Jasper, friends suggested the Waddells show the photos to someone from Parks Canada. That launched the recovery mission that brought the stump to the museum.
“It was just pure fluke that we discovered it,” Don Waddell said.
The petrified stump will be on display until 2013. Museum staff said they will do research to learn more about the conditions at the time the tree was growing. They also hope to pin down its exact age.