Six-year-old uncovers fossil find
A failed search for meteorite fragments has turned into a big fossil find for a six-year-old girl in Saskatchewan.
Lily Ganshorn was out with her dad Jon in an area around Lake Diefenbaker in August when she spotted a big shale rock.
Her father says Lily wanted him to break it and he happily obliged.
“As soon as we break it open, all of a sudden it’s like holy smokes ... it just started shimmering. I grabbed it, went out, washed the thing off and this thing is just almost glowing. It was so phosphorescent,” Ganshorn said in an interview with The Canadian Press. “And I’m looking at this thing and it’s like, man, we found something here.”
Ganshorn got in touch with the University of Saskatchewan, which told him to send pictures.
In mid-September, paleontology graduate student Meagan Gilbert confirmed the find as an ammonite — a shelled creature related to a modern day squid or octopus.
Southern Alberta, southwestern Saskatchewan, and an area stretching down into Montana were part of the Bearpaw Formation seabed about 75 million years ago.
That’s where the ammonite would have come from, said Gilbert.
“So you get a whole bunch of these little critters that would have been living at that point in time, that die on the bottom of the sea floor, and then you can find them as big blocks and stuff, because usually there were a lot of them living together,” she said.
Gilbert says ammonite fossils aren’t uncommon, but the size of the intact, undamaged ammonites the Ganshorns found is remarkable.
Ganshorn says after that first find, he and Lily started daily searches. They found little shells, mollusks and more ammonites. “Next thing you know, we’re sitting with like 50 or 60 of these things.”
One of the pieces is about the size of a bowling ball.