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Michael Burns, a palaeontology student at the University of Alberta, was part of a very special dinosaur fossil excavation in Edmonton. This is his story.

When I got out there, I was actually surprised – we don’t often find tyrannosaur teeth in the rocks around Edmonton. They showed me this tooth – probably the biggest one I’ve seen to come out of Edmonton ever – and that was fairly exciting. Then, when they sent me down into the tunnel, there was a huge femur still sticking out of the wall, which was even more exciting. It meant there was more material down there.

This all happened because I got a call one morning in late August. It was from Jack Brink at the Royal Alberta Museum. Apparently the Quesnell site construction workers first called the police because they didn’t have any idea who to call about their discovery. When they said they’d found bones, a medical examiner had to come out…of course, when you get a tooth that big you can pretty much figure it out. But they still needed the official report.

When they called the department here at the University of Alberta I was pretty much the only one up in the lab. So I said, ”Yeah, that sounds exciting. I’ll go out and take a look.” It sure beats sitting at the laptop all day.

The working environment – 100 feet underground inside a tunnel – was very different from how we usually collect specimens. But I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often because this area’s jam-packed with fossils – from dinosaurs, marine organisms, plants and so on. Mostly when we collect things we take everything out by digging out all the rock above it. In this case, though, we didn’t have that option because of the engineering constraints of the tunnel.

So it was unique being down in the tunnel with jackhammers, pulling out bones as they were found. The sediments are quite special – we have very hard bones and very soft rocks around it…basically, an ideal situation. We didn’t have to slow down work at all because we could just keep going through the layers with jackhammers as they normally dig and pull the bones out. What’s really interesting is that the rock layers these bones were in and the way they’re preserved is very similar to other sites that we’ve seen in Edmonton. It fills in a bit more of the story about what went on here in the past.

I’ve always had an interest in dinosaurs, but if you talk to anybody in this field, they’ve had an interest from a young age. And I came to Edmonton specifically for the program in palaeontology at the University of Alberta. Not only does the University of Alberta have a very long history of palaeontology, but it also has a diverse array of people in the program. They study fossil fish, fossil pollen, fossil plants, fossil reptiles, mammals, you name it. And Alberta also has some of the richest fossil beds anywhere in the world. It was a clear choice for me to come up here.