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Showdown or showroom in Tumber Ridge?

They're finding dinosaurs in northeastern B.C., but a lack of provincial protection for fossils has created a bone of contention

Rich McCrea wants me to pick out the lambeosaur dig site. Standing beside an anonymous creek, one of thousands gurgling through the vastness of northeastern British Columbia, I gaze up and down the heavily eroded opposite bank.

"There," I say finally, pointing.

"Congratulations," he replies, "you're the first visitor to get it right."

McCrea, who enjoys testing those who think they know too much, has an ulterior motive this time. With his season finished, the dig is protected by buried tarps and disguised with sediment and woody debris to be indistinguishable from dozens of other slumping cutbanks. McCrea hoped I wouldn't recognize the spot where British Columbia's first — and so far only — dinosaur skeleton lies waiting to be removed to the Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre (PRPRC) in Tumbler Ridge, where McCrea and his partner in pursuits both scientific and domestic, Lisa Buckley, will prepare it as the centerpiece of a nascent but already popular Dinosaur Discovery Gallery.

To be fair, I had better than average odds. Dual science and journalism credentials include my fair share of palaeontological excavations. And I've just spent a week in the field with McCrea, being schooled on the fossil riches of the Peace, in particular the Wapiti Formation that's cradling the lambeosaur (a form of hadrosaur, or duck-billed dino, sporting a head crest). I've learned how the Wapiti's secrets are revealed through a combination of downward watercourse erosion and upward weathering; how to isolate, amidst other exposed sediments, potential bone-bearing layers; and how to identify a so-called "fossil stink line" — a rusty halo in lighter-coloured rock, the iron-rich artifact of anaerobic decomposition whose presence suggests a higher probability of bone.

Probability plays a huge role in the treasure hunt that is palaeontology, and based on experience, analysis and possibly a tad of hubris, McCrea was fairly certain he'd find something when he first prospected here in 2007 with an Italian geologist. "We immediately found a theropod (meat-eating dino) digit in the creek," he recalls. "Further along I found more bone. It was from the lambeosaur."

McCrea and Buckley slowly excavated a worksite of some 60 square metres. For four summers they picked carefully downward at half-centimetre intervals with a hand awl; by 2009, they knew they were dealing with a partially articulated skeleton. The animal lies on one side, tail pointing toward the water and curling back on the hips while the rest of the body heads under the stream bank. A unique ecological feature of the burial emerged early: the highest number of tyrannosaur teeth ever found with another species — over 50, the majority from juveniles, indicating hyena-like scavenging of the carcass by young tyrannosaurs.

When it comes to scavenging of the lambeosaur, however, McCrea has a greater worry: amateur and commercial fossil hunters, who are propelled by B.C.'s lack of legislative protection for such sites — the reason the dig is so well hidden. "Something about dinosaurs drives people whacky," says physician Dr. Charles Helm, the driving force behind the non-profit Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation (TRMF). "There's glory and fame in a find, plus the connection with a distant past that we all feel. Some people want to own a piece of that, and feel they have the right to remove it. We're trying to instill that these remains represent knowledge that belongs to the province, the country — everyone."

As McCrea and I look out over one of the most bucolic excavations imaginable, he shares an important observation. "It's hard to find bone in this kind of concentration. We got lucky on this one."

Lucky indeed. And for the ntological aspirations of Tumbler Ridge, that fortuity extends back 230 MYBP (million years before present) to when the Rocky Mountains to the west were the bottom of an ocean ringing the supercontinent Pangaea, and sediments that gathered preserved the remains of countless invertebrates, fishes and marine reptiles such as the giant ichthyosaurs that the Peace is renowned for. During the mid-Cretaceous, 100 to 75 MYBP, serendipity covered Tumbler and environs in swampy coastal forest, a massive carbon-sink ultimately sequestered in coal beds whose sloughs, beaches and mud flats preserved the footprints and bones of its dinosaur denizens. The final stroke of geologic kismet was reserved for the lambeosaur skeleton: Pleistocene glaciers that scoured this valley missed it by only a metre. And now, some believe, the opportunity residing in this diverse prehistoric fortune might help smooth Tumbler's boom-and-bust sine wave of coal mining by contributing to tourism and other economic initiatives as it has next door in fossil-rich Alberta. Indeed, through contributions to the TRMF, the town has invested more than $1,000,000 in the proposition — money that McCrea, a champion fundraiser, is proud to have more than matched from other sources.

"There's obvious scientific value in the discovery and preservation of remains," says Larry White, a three-year mayor of Tumbler Ridge, who retired in 2011, and a museum volunteer formally trained in bone extraction and preparation at the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alta. "But there's also what it means to the town in terms of tourism and basic diversification. You need the science to make the museum a good attraction, and you need the museum in place so the palaeontologists can go out and explore. The province has a lot to gain from something that can ensure longevity of the town."

McCrea and Buckley, who've made significant commitments of their own, putting down roots and building a museum and research centre from scratch, are two of those crossing their fingers whilst working them to the bone. "We drove a heavy-duty all-terrain vehicle in with an air compressor that allowed us to work on delicate stuff with an air-scribe," McCrea bubbles as we scramble over a weathered logjam and back into the cold gloom of the forest. "A bonus was that the noise of the compressor kept people away — they thought it was an oil or gas operation."

Keeping the public off dig sites is a bugbear for most palaeontologists but borders on obsession with McCrea. We backtrack along a circuitous, several-kilometre trail that sees us alternately climbing and skidding down slick hills, wading shin-deep through sphagnum bog and generally heading in any direction other than directly to his truck, itself cryptically hidden so as not to pique the curiosity of passersby. Short of blindfolding, it's the easiest way to ensure I don't have a clue where we are. But if you think this paranoia, consider that a single unblemished Tyrannosaurus rex tooth can fetch five figures on the black market; that Sotheby's, eBay and dozens of dedicated websites trade daily in high-grade fossils; that such rabid commerce has made both legitimate fossil hunting and illegal removal rampant globally; and that located in a jurisdiction with zero formal protection, Tumbler Ridge has already experienced theft and vandalism at two public-access dinosaur trackways.

Framed thusly, McCrea's precautions seem less than extraordinary. Likewise, his refusal to publicly divulge the location of his latest large-scale dinosaur find — national news in the fall of 2010 — lest it draw unscrupulous amateurs and/or commercial interests. It's here that the future of Tumbler Ridge leaves science behind to intersect the complex human relationship with fossils.

An organism dies. Lying where it falls, the plant or animal is washed over with sediment, mineralized, converted to rock, pushed down into the Earth. Eons later, when this graveyard is exposed through mountain building and erosion, these remnants of ancient life reappear. A human — the only creature for which the distant past appears to have meaning — encounters this fractured forma, recognizing in it not only the long-vanished template of subsequent change, but certain relation. Such is the dialectic of a fossil: we don't go back in time, time comes back to us.

For Tumbler Ridge, a flotilla of hopeful roofs adrift in a sea of skeptical pine 400 km northeast of Prince George and a couple hours shy of the Alberta border, fossils are a very reason for existence. The town's birthmother, the Northeast Coal Project, was the largest single industrial enterprise in British Columbia's history: the entire model community, railroad spur and two mines (the Quintette and Bullmoose) were erected in three years beginning in 1981. After 17 years of prosperity that saw 65 million tonnes of metallurgical coal extracted and Tumbler's population peak at 5,000, the ground shifted when diving coal prices closed the Quintette prematurely in 2000. When the Bullmoose completed its lifespan in 2003, workers fled. A housing fire-sale attracted retirees and those interested in the region's tourism potential, but Tumbler limped through the decade. Then suddenly China was coveting coal and driving up prices, enough to spark a second generation of mines. With the Peace's oil and gas industry also flourishing, the town's population has rebounded from a low of 1,500 to nearly 4,000. Despite a visible scramble to patch-up infrastructure built to last only 25 years, Tumbler still resembles a shiny toy village, its history embodied in an enormous coal bucket dropped in the centre of town as if from space. But it's the whimsy of the paintings on structures throughout town that point the way to a different potential fortune — dinosaurs.

As the good times wound down in 2000, Tumbler lumbered onto the palaeontological radar when a string of strange impressions were discovered along Flatbed Creek by Charles Helm's son Daniel, then age eight, and a friend. As surmised by the boys and confirmed by McCrea — a specialist in ichnology, the study of trace and track fossils — these were dinosaur footprints, the trackway of a heavily armoured ankylosaur, sparking considerable local interest. Led by the enthusiastic Helm family, residents systematically explored the area. Additional trackways were found by both amateurs and the now-intrigued McCrea, who, during a 2001 visit to the Flatbed site, also found a piece of dinosaur bone — the first formally identified from the province. Major finds continued to accrue. In 2002, surveying together along Quality Creek canyon on the town's northeastern outskirts, prospector Wayne Sawchuk showed McCrea bone he'd spotted in a large sandstone block which had tumbled from the canyon's rim. Ribs, vertebrae and a fibula were quickly identified, the first significant concentration of dinosaur material for B.C. and Western Canada's oldest, from a period when land animals weren't well preserved on a global scale. But there was more.

The canyon cuts through the kilometre-thick Kaskapau Formation, about 20 million years older than the Wapiti and comprised mostly of marine deposits, with some freshwater material and a tiny terrestrial wedge. The several-tonne chunk of sandstone belonged to the latter, a bit of ancient river channel into which a diversity of organisms had washed to create a veritable bone omelet. What were the odds of encountering this isolated, oddball stratum let alone a palaeo treasure chest of dinosaur tracks, the bones of theropods, hadrosaur, ankylosaur, crocodile, turtle, fish, freshwater ray and a mélange of bivalves? McCrea couldn't say, but he spent the next two summers working on it. The hook was set.

"The foundation applied for $326,000 in funding for a lab and needed a palaeontologist to lead it," he says. "They asked me, and based on what was being found it was obvious this was a ground-up opportunity of a lifetime."

Originally from Saskatchewan and with degrees in biology, education and geology, McCrea took an indeterminate hiatus from his Ph.D. studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton to move to Tumbler Ridge. He hired Buckley, born and raised in Rossland, B.C., and similarly papered in zoology, geology and biological sciences, onto the Quality project, where shared aspirations and interests soon found them on a different kind of trackway — marriage. Together they worked with community and regional funding sources to establish the surprisingly sophisticated PRPRC, which has state-of-the-art digital-imaging software for analyzing prints, modern storage, preparation, curatorial and education facilities, and a compelling gallery all housed in a renovated elementary school. The PRPRC greatly increased understanding of Tumbler's ancient heritage for both the public and science, a line that isn't always easy to tread or understand. While the town has been generously supportive, councillors occasionally express reservations, such as being happy to fund a museum but not research, demonstrating lack of knowledge over a museum's function or the academic brand required to make one relevant.

"I'd like to see the research institute given some permanent core funding either by the provincial or federal governments and also by universities," says Tumbler resident Ryan Murray, consultant to a wind-energy company that McCrea worked with to establish its own fossil-encounter procedures. "I'd love to see all the volunteers' and palaeontologists' hard work rewarded."

Research faces at least one other obstruction in Tumbler Ridge: Christianity. Like other rural parts of the province, the Peace has its share of fundamentalism. The PRPRC, in fact, sits adjacent to an evangelical congregation. While it's impossible to disavow the existence of fossilized bone and teeth from giant, extinct creatures, the storytelling behind them — and the theory of evolution — is another matter. Open-minded people of faith, including local councillors, have no problem comfortably weaving their own interpretations and happily send their kids to the summer dinosaur camps offered through the PRPRC. Others clearly see it as a threat, and vandalization of signs and track sites has included anti-evolution slogans.

Visiting the Quality site with Buckley and McCrea, I'm first taken by the beauty of staircase pools and waterfalls gurgling down stacks of thin sandstone pancakes. Secondly, I'm struck by the massive bone-block and surrounding footprint casts, one of which shows stunning skin detail. It's time-travel deluxe. My third impression — as I contemplate plunging to certain but scenic death — is the difficulty of making this find; the ruggedness of terrain, sheer walls and precipitous "trail" required to access the canyon floor, for which a rappel would not be inappropriate. I suggest that it must have been a struggle to haul equipment and samples up and down for the two years they worked the site. They smile in unison. "B.C.," quips Buckley, "does not give up her fossils easily."

The idea is to float about 100 kilometres along the river on which Buckley and McCrea made their big find in September 2010 — 150 kilograms of hadrosaur and theropod bone from a different Wapiti outcrop than the one that served up the lambeosaur. On that trip the pair spent three days exploring after being dropped by helicopter. Employing inflatable rafts on this go-round means covering more ground, more cheaply, with more personnel. And there's abundant precedent: many notable palaeontological surveys of past centuries in Western Canada were accomplished by boat.

After a two-hour drive to a launch site on a side creek, six of us embark. Buckley, McCrea and I man one of the four-metre rafts, each loaded with more than a tonne of gear, while the other holds photographer Marina Dodis, a slugabed husky named Ringo and a pair of volunteer fossil enthusiasts from Fort St. John. Lee Hollen works in the gas industry and Martin Lavoie is a painter; both are hunters and fishermen who've seen plenty of fossils, know the secret locations of giant ichthyosaurs and have extensive rafting backgrounds.

Bumping over rocks and around sweepers in shallow rapids we soon reach a junction with the main flow. While Hollen and Lavoie enthusiastically set up camp near a likely fishing hole, the rest of us hike upstream. Alternately struggling over slick, bankside rubble and the dense, mossy bush above it during a cold downpour is tough going — albeit a good introduction to the rigours of dino-prospecting. The cutbanks are extremely dynamic, shedding everything from large boulders to massive clay slumps and mature trees. Potential for a serious accident is huge. The palaeos use ice axes to move on the precipitous slopes; Buckley wears a helmet.

Although we see little save for carbonized fossil wood, leaves and cones, particularly compelling are the many contemporary examples of this process: sandy impressions of shorebird feet abutting sediments in which similar-shaped theropod prints are found; chunks of fossilized wood next to a freshly buried log; elk antlers, mossy and weathered, imbedded in streamside mud. All reminders that life on Earth is a very long cycle.

After a cold night, we graze a Spartan breakfast while packing jumbo lunches that might last a week. This time a half hour of downstream hiking delivers us to the base of towering outcrops seen from camp. Again there's plenty of plant material but not much else. The going, however, is far easier. Slabs of sandstone mix with glacial overburden below the outcrops, giving way to long stretches of post-glacial deposition. The palaeos aren't impressed. "Glaciers really beat this place up," says Buckley.

Just then, however, McCrea recognizes prints in the long, smooth shelf we're traversing — two enormous hind feet and the accompanying hands of a hadrosaur — fortuitously defined by the rainwater they've collected. He measures and photographs the prints and plots the location on his GPS. Then, the find of the day: three small theropod casts (the positive, raised outlines of in-filled prints) on a 10-kilogram slab, small enough to transport. McCrea is happy enough to proclaim a reward of wine with dinner.

Floating downriver over the next few days we find bone or prints everywhere we look. We also find some quality coal, using the weightier lumps stranded on gravel bars to stoke massive campfires. It's around such a blaze, over rum and tea, that Hollen and Lavoie dish excitedly about their big ichthyosaurs. In the case of Hollen's animal — at 25-metres perhaps the largest known — he reached out first to the late Elizabeth (Betsy) Nicholls, at the time the Tyrell's curator of marine reptiles. She encouraged Hollen to contact the B.C. Provincial Museum in Victoria, where the person he reached proceeded to call him a thief for having fossil material in his possession. Hollen was taken aback — he was, after all, trying to alert science to the find. Once again, B.C.'s lack of fossil protection was to blame.

The fear among professional palaeontologists is that much has and will be lost because of cavalier government attitudes that value mining, power and timber over information that should be part of the public trust, leaving private interests free reign to cull fossil deposits. This isn't hypothetical: at the McAbee site near Cache Creek in the B.C. Interior, one the world's most important for Eocene fossil insects and plants, commercial fossil hunting, road building and mining for cat litter production continues. Under pressure from increasing media scrutiny, the government and operators signed a memo of understanding in 2010 stating that the latter wouldn't release scientifically important fossils to the public. But policing is impossible: a friend recently visited McAbee and plunked down $50 to dig fossils with her family. Although well-instructed and partially supervised, they were left on their own to remove a box of specimens, most of which weren't screened.

The scurrilous activity, egomaniacal posturing, political dealing and legal challenges around British Columbia's fossil issues were enough to spawn a book. Sidetracked: The Struggle for B.C.'s Fossils, by Prince George author Vivien Lougheed. It stands primarily as apologia for the maligned amateur, of which there are many. People like Hollen, who have an interest in fossils, make important finds and contact scientists only to be slighted in their desire for credit or involvement. As the book also documents, however, overzealous amateurs can be an annoyance to time-poor scientists like McCrea, who happily works with many volunteer keeners, publishes articles on the value of amateur-professional collaboration and engages industry in the Peace on the same front. There are equal arguments for employing amateurs, who far outnumber pros as field troops in the quest for valuable fossils, and against, in that untrained individuals can be a liability or motivated by potential profit. The starting point for any resolution is legislation.

Blair Lekstrom, interviewed when he was MLA for Peace River South (he did not run in the 2013 election), supported McCrea's efforts to close the legislative gap. "The palaeontological reserves already unearthed in British Columbia," says Lekstrom, "indicate that the province should enact legislation to protect these resources for future generations."

"The writing's on the wall for a lot of places in the world right now," adds Canada's preeminent palaeontologist, University of Alberta's Phil Currie. "If you don't protect the resources, you get destruction or loss because (those resources) are collected and sold off. I think most people recognize that legislation is necessary." Not only would Currie and other scientists like to see British Columbia take its palaeontological resources more seriously, but many have long been surprised that Tumbler doesn't have a world-class research institute considering what it has access to and has accomplished. "Creating the institute should, at least in part, be a government responsibility," says Currie. "Certainly the resources are a government responsibility."

Yet Sidetracked questions Tumbler's suitability to host such a facility, asserting, Chamber of Commerce-style, that a larger town on a main route with a university and more restaurants (like Prince George) is a more logical location to curate, study and exhibit fossils. It seems an odd argument given the history, genesis and popularity of the Royal Tyrell in Drumheller, a once unknown town that now sees 400,000 visitors annually. Then again, as Tyrell executive director Andy Neuman says, "It's a challenge to sustain a major institution within a three-hour drive of over two million people. It would be a greater challenge in Tumbler Ridge."

Challenge or not, unlikely help could be at hand. Across the border in tiny Wembley, Alta., the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative (PCDI) is working overtime to realize its own museum and education facility by summer 2013. The PCDI has partnered with Travel Alberta to highlight the fossil resources on the Alberta side of the Peace through well-publicized dino digs with celebrities such as Dan Akroyd and starring turns on major television shows. You'd be forgiven for thinking, as some TRMF board members initially believed, that the dino-museum-game was some kind of competition. McCrea has since convinced them otherwise. "This concentrates interest in palaeontology in the area," he says, "and that creates both better tourism options and more opportunity for professional collaboration."

Outside the museum after our rafting trip, next to several-tonne trackway slabs propped on wooden skids, wide-eyed staffers gather round McCrea's truck to see what treasures he's brought back. White, too, fresh from thrashing compost in the community garden that occupies the former schoolyard. He traces a finger knowingly over the small theropod prints.

"Palaeontology opened up a new perspective for me," he had told me earlier. "It's part of our inherent urge to acquire knowledge. Every time these people go out, they come back with more stuff we need to learn about. In the general scope of things, that's priceless."

Indeed everyone is riveted. It's that dialectic again.

As children, dinosaurs impress simply for being super-sized and super-cool (Barney notwithstanding), but as we learn more, they morph from giant caricatures of the nature we know into vanguards of the nature we will never know. Lost in the sleepy folds of deep time, dinosaurs are the monsters under evolution's bed, forever lovable in the mind's eye.

For some, fascination with this organic machinery turns to consideration of what it took to run it, the ecology that supported it, its legacy of design - folks like the Helm family, White, Hollen and Lavoie, who have seen a corner of their own souls through footprints and mineralized bone and wish to learn more, and people like McCrea and Buckley, whose passion and fastidious studies ultimately give these creatures meaning and gravitas.

It would be hard to imagine any community not benefitting significantly should it find a way to value both of these resources.

This past August, after six years of painstaking and delicate work by many individuals, B.C.'s most complete dinosaur skeleton was finally airlifted by helicopter from the bush to the PRPRC in a giant plaster cast suspended on a 70-metre line. The cast around the articulated bones had been started in 2012, but with helicopters unavailable due to forest fires the lift had to wait until 2013. Of note at time of extraction was the animal's missing head, possibly buried nearby. "There's a good chance the skull will be there, but we're still on the hunt," says Buckley. Since the author's visit, more T. rex teeth have also been found and additional limb bones now suggest the site contains remains from up to three individual hadrosaurs. The PRPRC palaeontologists continue to keep the location secret due to British Columbia's lack of protection for fossils — the only province without such legislation.



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