Oil diggers discover a dinosaur

Oil diggers discover a dinosaur

Syncrude Canada Ltd. is considered to be the world’s largest producer of synthetic crude oil from oil sands and the largest single source producer in Canada.

The company’s heavy equipment operator recently discovered what happens to be a nearly complete plesiosaur as they dug in Canada’s oil sands. Plesiosaur is one of the giant, carnivorous, four-flipper reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era.

The fossil of the dinosaur was discovered on November 14^th 2011 and it is now being examined by the scientists of Royal Tyrrell Museum. It is still being removed by the Paleontology scientists and they plan on removing it by the end of the week.

According to the museum’s representative Don Brinkman, the fossil is a rare find. He said:

“It’s a long necked plesiosaur, which is a marine reptile with a very long neck, small head and short body. The last one that was recovered was 10 years ago; it was recognized as a new kind and given the name Wapuskanectes.”

As soon as the fossil was found, the museum was given charge to remove it safely.

Maggy Horvath said that she immediately stopped digging and told the company’s geologists to contact Royal Tyrrell so their Fossil Discoveries section can work on it. She said:

 “It felt pretty good to call my son and let him know that I found a prehistoric fossil while working in the mine,” she said.

Canada’s oil sands are currently the third-largest oil reserves in the world and they are located in an area which is a part of the prehistoric sea.

This is not for the first time that Syncrude has discovered a fossil. In fact, this is the tenth fossil which they have managed to discover. The last one was found by them back in 2000 and it was calculated to be 110 million years old.

The fossil found in the year 2000 was considered to be the most complete Cretaceous Ichthyosaurs of its age ever discovered in North America.

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Posted by Ahmad Mehdi on Nov 25 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry