Piecing together province’s ancient past
Work keeps childhood passion alive
REGINA — Wes Long couldn’t have asked for a better project to launch a new career while volunteering with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) more than 20 years ago.
“Scotty is quite the beast and a huge undertaking ... (But) that’s the final payoff, to see the skeleton standing,” said Long, the RSM’s curatorial assistant for paleontology, referring to Scotty the Tyrannosaurus Rex famously discovered in 1991 in the Frenchman River Valley.
“I was used to seeing it on the work bench (and) off the work bench sitting on shelves. But then, once it’s finally put together, you really get a sense of how huge that animal really was,” Long said.
Long, who grew up in Lumsden, has a background in fine arts and was working in broadcasting at the time of the discovery. He started volunteering with the RSM as a way to reconnect with his childhood passion — dinosaurs.
Long was involved with Scotty’s excavation in 1994 and then spent about 10 years preparing the T. Rex for display.
Now, Long’s main project is working on the chest of a Plesiosaur — a 10-metre long marine reptile that lived in Saskatchewan 70 million years ago. That reptile was discovered in the early 1990s near Ponteix.
“It’s been a challenging piece. It’s encased in iron stone, so it’s pretty time consuming ... it’s a hard rock to chip off.”
When something is discovered in the field, it is encased in burlap and plaster, similar to “bandaging up a broken arm,” he said. The specimen is shipped to the lab, where Long removes the casing and then begins chipping away at the surrounding rock.
He uses several tools to free the bones, such as dental picks, scalpels and a miniature jackhammer called an air scribe.
“You’ve got to have a keen eye for detail and make sure you’re not removing away any of the bone while you’re chipping the rock off,” he said.
Long is also working on a skeletal reproduction of a Borealosuchus — a twometre long crocodile that roamed the Big Muddy area 60 million years ago.
The original parts are placed in rubber moulds to create plastic copies. Those plastic copies are assembled while the original pieces will be placed in storage for future research. In cases where the specimen is incomplete, Long reproduces the missing pieces in order to “fill in the blanks.”
The reptile and crocodile discoveries are among many that offer a glimpse of what Saskatchewan looked like 60 million to 70 million years ago when the province was part of the Western Interior Seaway and mostly underwater.
“It extended right from the Arctic all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico (and) basically split North America in two,” Long explained.
Prior to working on Scotty, Long was involved with another memorable excavation in the 1990s of a Tylosaurus — a large marine lizard — located near Lake Diefenbaker. The preparation work is completed, and the skeleton is assembled and on temporary display at the museum.
“ONCE IT’S FINALLY PUT TOGETHER, YOU REALLY GET A SENSE OF HOW HUGE THAT ANIMAL REALLY WAS.”
WES LONG