UBC’s Open Collections contains hundreds of thousands of materials covering a vast number of topics, making it an amazing resource for anyone with historical research interests. Personally, I find great joy in interest driven research, and one collection in particular that often returns excellent materials is the BC Historical Newspaper Collection.
This week I was interested in writing a blog post featuring historical news articles on paleontological findings in western Canada. I was pleased to find a great number of articles on discoveries in Northeastern British Columbia, Alberta, as well as international findings in 19th and 20th Centuries. This blog post features a few of the articles on some early Western Canadian fossil findings.
Since the late 19th Century, many paleontological fossils have been found in Western Canada, mainly concentrated around Northeastern B.C. and the Badlands in Southern Alberta. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, at least 88 species of dinosaurs have been found in Canada (Dinosaurs and Canada, 2012).
Dinosaurs were unknown until the early to mid 19th Century, and the general understanding of these prehistoric animals was still developing when these newspaper articles were published. This elementary understanding is evident when reading articles such as this one found on page 3 of the October 1872 edition of the Cariboo Sentinel.
The article is concerning a fossilized bone that was found in a riverbed. At the time there was apparently only one individual “bold enough to express an opinion” on the fossil and they claimed that it was a vertebra from “a species of flying alligator”, of which the author seems slightly skeptical. While this idea may seem slightly silly as we now know enough to understand that the “flying alligator” description of dinosaurs is not entirely correct, considering the limited understanding and language for describing dinosaurs at the time it probably could have been worse. Unfortunately, I could not locate a follow up article or further information as to whether the specimen was ever identified or verified as a dinosaur fossil or not.
The following article is a short piece on Dinosaur remains found in Alberta and briefly recounts findings of Canadian geologist and paleontologist Lawrence Lambe. Found on page 2 of the October, 1898 edition of the Revelstoke Herald:
In October, 1911 the Daily News reported on the fossils found in Red Deer, Alberta being sent to the American Museum of Natural History rather than staying in Canada to be displayed at the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa. This arrangement was apparently due to permission given to the museum by the Canadian government many years prior.
The article is concluded in the following image:
In November 1913 the New Westminster News published this article on a report made by the vertebrate paleontologist of the Dominion government which discusses several amazing finds made near the Red Deer River in Alberta. These finds were reported as including several nearly complete skeletons of large dinosaurs some of which were thought to be new discoveries.
I hope you enjoyed reading these historical news articles and that maybe you were inspired to search within UBC’s Open Collections for any historical interests of your own!
Thank you for reading!
Works cited
Dinosaurs and Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia. (2012, February 11). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/dinosaur
