Saskatchewan Skeptics

The CBC has this article about the lack of paleontologists in the province.

Saskatchewan has one of the richest dinosaur fossil deposits of all the Canadian provinces, but it’s an underdeveloped resource, experts say.

The fossils, many of them found in the Frenchman River Valley, are reminders of an ancient time, tens of millions of years ago, when triceratops, ankylosaurus and tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth.

Hans Larsson, who’s a paleontologist with McGill University in Montreal, says while Saskatchewan doesn’t have as rich a fossil record as Alberta, it is still comparable.

“It’s a bit of a mystery why more work hasn’t been done there. Perhaps Alberta has sort of taken the show for many of years and this is why the majority of research has been focussed on Alberta. But Saskatchewan, I think, is equally important.”

In Saskatchewan, some fossil-bearing layers of rock are close to the surface, leaving some dinosaur fossils exposed to the elements.

Wes Long, a paleontological technician who works for the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Eastend, says he’s worried good fossils are being destroyed by erosion.

“It’s just really, really frustrating,” he said.

The problem, he says, is essentially a severe labour shortage in the province’s fossil industry.

There are only two professionals in the province who work in vertebrate paleontology, which is the study of dinosaurs and other animal fossils.

That compares to roughly 30 paid researchers in the field in Alberta

Read more: CBC

If you have never been to the East End T. Rex Discovery Center its worth a visit.

Live Science has this article on a new bonebed found near Hilda Alberta.

Scientists have revealed what may be the world’s largest dinosaur graveyard.

The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass die-off resulting from a monster storm, comparable to today’s hurricanes, which struck what was then a coastal area.

The findings could help solve a mystery concerning why the badlands of western Canada are so rich in dinosaur fossils.

The roughly 76-million-year-old fossil beds apparently hold thousands of bones over an area of at least 568 acres (2.3 square km), skeletons that belonged to a roughly cow-sized, plant-eating horned dinosaur known as Centrosaurus. This treasure trove provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers easily in the high hundreds to low thousands, said senior research scientist David Eberth, a paleontologist and geologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta.

The “mega-bonebed,” which consists of 14 smaller bonebeds, lies in northern Alberta near Hilda, Canada, right by the border with Saskatchewan. The graveyard was actually discovered in 1997, but confirmation of the discovery’s size was detailed this month in the book “New Perspectives On Horned Dinosaurs” (Indiana University Press, 2010). [Illustration of centrosaur herd]

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The CBC article is even better.