Ancient stump at root of new Alberta museum display

Don and Julia Waddell were after elk on 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 huge 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 viewing 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 3,035 kilograms.

The stump’s size, and the fact that it was found on the treed shoreline of the Athabasca River, 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 assist- ant curator of geology, said 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 sling and winches for the hauling.

Experts are trying to figure out 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.