Alberta fishermen snag rare dinosaur uncovered by 2013 floods

Thursday, November 13, 2014, 2:54 PM - A Calgary father and son out fishing in Alberta caught more than dinner. They snagged the fossilized remains of a potential new species of dinosaur.

It’s believed the rock containing the fossil was exposed during the 2013 summer floods in Alberta. The devastating floodwaters were a boon to paleontologists, exposing several significant dinosaur specifics.

This specimen, unveiled this week, is thought to come from a duck-billed family of dinos called hadrosaurs. They are herbivores that roamed what’s now North America, Asia and Europe some 80-million years ago.

The fishing pair found the fossil in August in the Castle River southwest of Calgary and contacted Alberta’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alta.

Researchers there had to wait until late October for the water level to recede enough to extract the boulder, roughly one-square meter in size more than 1,100 kilograms. It includes the skull, spine, neck shoulder, chest and possible more embedded in the hard rock.

“This specimen is coming from a place where we haven't had dinosaurs before," Donald Henderson, the museum's curator of dinosaurs, says in a video showing how they extracted the rock using a helicopter. "This will be a significant specimen. We're going to learn a lot from it."