Celebrating 25 years of Eastend’s favourite resident... Scotty
He came back to the site with Grant Schutte, who was at the 25th anniversary event. Tokaryk found the huge teeth still in the jaw of the T. rex, which meant there was some trapping mechanism holding them in place.
“That was the moment I knew right away that all bets were off,” he said.
“This is something we have never handled before. … So within five minutes of finding the teeth and the jaw I went running around, I chainsmoked, I swore up and down, and I couldn’t focus for a while to figure out the next step, how do I get it out?”
The start of the excavation drew over 6,000 curious visitors to the site in 1994 and the discovery of the first T. rex in Saskatchewan made news around the world.
The process to excavate Scotty and learn more about the 65-million-yearold skeleton took a long time.
“I think we were finished in 2002 at the actual site, but it was only about seven years ago that we finally finished pulling the bones out of the rock here in the lab as well as in Regina,” he said.
“It was like pulling teeth. Paleontologists have said it usually takes about 18 person years to fully pull a skeleton like that out; and overall between all the time for excavating and all the time for preparation it did take us almost 18 years to pull this thing out.”
Scientists are still learning more about Scotty. Earlier this year a University of Alberta research paper confirmed that Scotty is the biggest T. rex ever found.
The discovery of Scotty had a lasting impact on paleontological research in Saskatchewan.
In 1994 there was only a small provincial operation that consisted of Tokaryk and John Storer, who also attended the 25th anniversary event.
“With the added resources and the larger awareness internally within the government, we were recognized as a tourism feature, a good news feature,” Tokaryk said.
“The discoveries we were making year after year, not just with the T. rex, but since the T. rex, are a significant benefit to the public image of the province. It’s emulated in the Canada Post stamp that featured our T. rex. The provincial fossil is a T. rex. So it raised the profile of interest of visitors to here as well as Regina of having the museum, having paleontology relevant in today’s culture as well as today’s science.”