Paleontologists say they have made a significant discovery of dinosaur fossils on a remote mountaintop in northern British Columbia that may include entirely new species of the prehistoric animals.
The rich fossil field in Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Park yielded teeth from relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops — and possibly from the real things — as well as bones from at least one large duck-billed herbivore and the foot of a small meat-eating dinosaur that could be related to the velociraptor.
“We are definitely thrilled about what we found,” said Victoria Arbour, curator of palaeontology at the Royal B.C. Museum and lead researcher on the project.
More than 90 fossils were collected during the 10-day expedition this summer into the Skeena Mountains.
The hardened teeth and bone pieces and fragments are estimated to be about 66 million to 68 million years old.
They were collected on a mountain about 2,000 metres above sea level in an area known as the Sustut Basin, where in the early 1970s, a retired geologist discovered the remains of a dinosaur previously unknown to science.
Nicknamed Buster, Ferrisaurus sustutensis was about the size of a sheep with a long lizard tail and big skull with a short, sharp parrot-like beak and a long curving jaw bone.
It’s a relative of the triceratops, but without the long horns and skull frill, and has been recreated as a display in the RBCM.
Arbour said although it will take several months to determine the species involved in this year’s find, the bones will reveal much about how dinosaurs lived in the Cretaceous period in British Columbia.
“We’re excited to start figuring out what species we may have found — these could be examples of T. rex and Triceratops known from elsewhere in Canada and the U.S., or they could be entirely new species not yet known to science,” says Arbour.
“Were they able to travel across the mountains to other areas where the T. rex lived? We don’t know. But these are the things we can possibly find out.”
Arbour said the site, between Dease Lake and Smithers, is unlike any other in Canada. “Not only are we finding fossils in the mountains, but the dinosaurs we are finding were living among the mountains, too, which is really different compared to other fossil sites in North America.”
She said the area of the find would have been much different in the age of the dinosaurs, with mountains as high as the Himalayas — before being ground down by glaciation — where dinosaurs lived in lush valleys dotted with ponds and rivers among tall redwood cedars, ferns and flowering plants.
Arbour said the area would have been much warmer than it is today, and the eastern side of the mountains would have given way to an inland sea, on the other side of which — in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan and some American states — several skeletons, some largely intact, have been found.
The Sustut Basin area is essentially unexplored, said Arbour, which means anything found there has the potential to be either a new record of dinosaurs found elsewhere in North America or species that are completely new.”
It was the third visit to the site after similar expeditions in 2019 and 2022 — and the longest for the crew, which included Arbour, RBCM palaeontology collections manager and researcher Derek Larson, University of Victoria grad students Emily Cross and Teague Dickson, former Royal B.C. Museum summer intern Brady McBride and Auburn University Prof. Thomas Cullen.
Previously, summer trips were cut short by snowstorms and other inclement weather. The area is only accessible by helicopter and the team was limited in what they could bring. The crew lived in small tents and ate dehydrated foods, granola and meat sticks and jerky.
They used rock saws to cut small boulders to look for fossils and spent almost every hour of daylight on their hands and knees in a boulder field, before moving higher to the area where the boulders had originated.
Arbour said on this year’s visit, they decided to walk farther up the mountain and discovered an area “just covered in fossils” in plain sight.
“Within a few minutes everyone just started saying: ‘I got something here,’ ” said Arbour. “It was pretty exciting.”
The team found items like pieces of a tyrannosaur tooth, rounded, worn and black with age, a meat-eating dinosaur hip bone with marrow and the backbone of a dinosaur embedded in rock.
In one two-metre-square area, researchers found several bones of a theropod that might be a velociraptor, said Arbour.
The museum released some photos of the finds, but did not make the collection available to the media on Tuesday.
“What we found [is] not super-glamorous — there are no intact skeletons,” said Arbour. “But the stories these pieces will tell will be pretty amazing.”
The museum said determining the full scope of the discovery will require extensive analysis and interpretation. Many of the bones will need to be removed from the surrounding concrete-like rock by the museum’s fossil experts.
Over the next few years, the fossils will be analyzed at the museum’s new collections facility in Colwood, a secure repository for the province’s collections and research set to open in 2026.
Arbour said visitors will be able to observe the research process through viewing windows into the palaeontology lab.
The Trebek Initiative is a collaboration between the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the National Geographic Society and was inspired by late Jeopardy host Alex Trebek’s passion for geography and exploration.
• For rules about fossil collecting in B.C., go to Fossil management in British Columbia.
