Vincent McDermott Writes Stuff

It was deep into his night shift at Syncrude when Greg Fisher made one of the biggest paleontological finds in Canada.

Sometime around 3 a.m. in April of 1994, the 24-year-old operator pulled his 35 cubic-yard scoop out of the ground when he noticed something odd in the bucket of rock and dirt. When Fisher stopped to examine his find, he saw bones.

Two years prior, another operator named Willie Brevant accidently stumbled across an ichthyosaurus, a carnivorous aquatic reptile resembling modern dolphins, buried under layers of rock in the same area. While it died 112 million years ago, the rest of its kind went extinct 95 million years ago, 30 million years before the rest of the dinosaurs died.

After that first discovery, Syncrude realized a policy was needed for the next time a mining operation would unearth a dinosaur. The company agreed work in the area would stop, as a geologist would contact researchers at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller.

Fisher had stumbled upon one of the most complete and well-preserved plesiosaur skeletons found in North America, and one of the few intact skulls.

Two million years after Brevant's ichthyosaurus died, the long-necked reptile ended a life spent prowling the rivers and seas covering most of North America for food. For eons, it rested underneath 60 metres of rock and soil before Fisher’s night shift started. The species of plesiosaur discovered, dubbed Nichollssaura, would help paleontologists fill a 40-million year research gap.

“The middle rock was the centre of this marine reptile. It was a torso, up to a good part of the neck and close to the tail,” said Fisher, now a production supervisor with the company. “We said we better get the other two as well. One piece had the head and a small part of the neck, and the other side had the rest of the tail and the rear flipper.”

If he did not notice the find, he would have emptied his shovel as usual, shattering the skeleton. On Saturday, it will have been 25 years since Brevant first discovered the remains of a dinosaur in the oilsands. It will be a milestone 112 million years in the making.

“It’s always an interesting day when you find something,” said Greg Fuhr, Syncrude’s vice president of production, during a Wednesday morning press conference at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. The museum has a mould of the skeletons found by Fisher and Brevant, while the originals are at the Royal Tyrell.

“It’s an incredible skill to pick them out when you’re dealing with a machine that’s lifting 100 tonnes at a time in large buckets,” he said. “We’re dealing with an incredible history here with incredible value. You can’t replace this kind of thing.”

Since 1994, 11 major fossil discoveries have been unearthed at Syncrude. In 2011, a nodosaur was discovered at Suncor Energy’s Millennium mine and in 2012, an elasmosaur was unearthed during construction of the Parsons Creek interchange.

Much of Wood Buffalo’s history has been underwater. For millions of years, it was part of the Western Interior Seaway, which at it’s height stretched from the Yukon and Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

In what would become Fort McMurray, the closest shoreline was somewhere near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, with temperatures similar to what would be found off the coast of Vancouver and Oregon. It was not a tropical climate, said Don Brinkman, director of preservation and research at the museum, but there was also no evidence of ice.

As time went on, the continents continued shifting and colliding with each other. In North America, the crashing of the plates formed the rocky mountains and the seas that bisected the continent would drain towards the Gulf of Mexico.

“The mining has been the key factor that has brought these finds to life,” said Brinkman. “If it were not for the mining activities in Alberta’s north, we wouldn’t know about these finds.” 

Wednesday, March 29, 2017 / Fort McMurray Today