Significant dinosaur fossil discovered in southwestern Manitoba

Researchers near Morden, Manitoba have made a Dino-mite discovery — they believe to have found a full-sized fossil of a Mosasaur dinosaur which lived more than 80 million years ago.

It’s a discovery Gerry Peters has been waiting on for quite some time. He and his team at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre have unearthed potentially the biggest fossil find in Manitoba in decades.

“To find most of a skeleton, as it’s turning out, does not happen every day or even every decade, so it’s very exciting for us,” said Peters.

“We don’t know nearly everything, not even close to what the world was like in our area 80 million years ago. Stuff like this, any support that we have can really help further that.”

Peters says they made the discovery in June and have been uncovering several other fossils since then. Just on Wednesday, he says they found their first tooth connected to the Mosasaur vertebrae, which he says is significant.

“What we have found to start with looks like it’s the tail and now we are slowly following the backbone all the way up to the head, so now we uncovered our first tooth, so it’s a great sign that the skull will be found as well,” said Peters.

Sabrina Froese is in her third year at the University of Manitoba, studying a double major in Anthropology and History and is hoping to have a career in archaeology. She is working with Peters as a summer student and was the researcher who found the Mosasaur tooth.

“I’ve found a couple of arrowheads in my time, but this is definitely far above any of that. It’s quite an honour to be involved in something this big and quite ground breaking,” said Froese.

80 million years ago, Manitoba was right in the heart of a saltwater sea called the Western Interior Seaway and was home to some of history’s most fearsome creatures. The Morden area, southwest of Winnipeg, is a hot spot for finding fossils. In 2004, a team of researchers found a 23-foot long plesiosaur, nicknamed ‘Betsy’ in a cow pasture.

“There’s so much history around you. Like I had no idea how much I could actually get into here in Morden and it’s just insane what I can actually be involved in,” said Froese.

Peters says he hopes his team can uncover the entire fossil by fall before the winter hits.