Paleo Panels

About two years ago Palcoprep started producing Paleo Panels, which were followed up shortly thereafter by the smaller Paleo Plaques.  These are cast in reinforced concrete and then stained.  These feature replicas of actual fossils. Most of these have been sculpted with the actual fossil used as a guide.  Some portions are molded from the actual fossils themselves.  The large Paleo Panels are intended to be used as feature landscaping pieces in yards, estates and parks.  The smaller Paleo Plaques are intended to be used as garden stones in flower beds, planters and gardens.  We have also just come out with a set of blocks that can be used to make pathways and sidewalks.  These feature replica dinosaur trackways.  All items are available from select landscape supply companies throughout Alberta, or directly from Palcoprep in Drumheller.  Additional information is available upon request. Just recently we have come up with a method that also allows us to produce these items in light weight reinforced polymer.  This makes the Panels and Plaques now suitable for use as interior décor, either wall mounted as interior display items.

Lillian the Albertosaurus

Several months ago Lillian the Albertosaurus was loaned to the Drumheller High School by the Royal Tyrrell Museum.  For years Lillian had been on display, but needed to find a new home.  The High School had just undergone a major renovation and Lillian found a new home there.  To complete the installation Lillian needed a new base and this is where Palcoprep came in.  We were contracted to sculpt a new realistic looking base from which Lillian could keep an eye on the school library.  It turned out nicely, and everyone was quite happy with the finished product.

Ammonite Project

I quote a report written by Brad Pisony - Senior Quality Technologist - Elk Valley Coal Corporation.

Giant Ammonite Un-Earthed

On the night shift of November 15^th, 2004, at Elk Valley Coal Corporation’s Coal Mountain Operations, south east of Sparwood, BC, “G” crew’s  Richard Budd (operator of an O&K RH200 Shovel excavator) noticed something very unusual and very rare in the digging face of the 1896 bench: a fossilized giant ammonite rolled out from the edge of the 23 cubic meter bucket and came to rest near the toe of the face!  Fortunately, thanks to Richard’s keen eye and awareness of such fossil potential, the specimen was salvaged from the face, with the help of Luigi Sagrafena operating a Caterpillar 994 production loader. 

The find was set aside in a safe place where it was blanketed by a thin layer of snow later that night.  It was eventually moved into the warehouse away from the detrimental effects of the weather.

This is the second of these giant ammonite fossils recovered in the past 30 years at Coal Mountain.  The first was about one third the size and was identified as Lytoceras.  The fossil specimen found in November 2004 is much larger and very rare in North America. It has tentatively been identified as a “Titanites occidentalis,” (Western Giant), the second only known specimen of this extinct fossil species next to the one discovered in 1947 in nearby Coal Creek by a BCGS mapping team.

Ammonites are ancient relatives of the modern day Nautilus, which can be found in the shallow waters of the tropical South Pacific.

In July 1947 a field crew mapping coal outcrops for the BC Geological Survey were working in a drainage east of Fernie.  A student had reported finding a “fossil truck tire”.  A few years later GSC Paleontologist Hans Frebold described and named the fossil as “Titanites occidentalis” after the large Jurassic aged ammonites found in Dorset, England.

The fossil’s size and nature of preservation prevented it from being moved to a museum, and therefore disallowed one of the requirements when naming a new species.  Only latex molds were made of the Coal Creek specimen.

The recent Coal Mountain ammonite find may now provide paleontologists with a good diagnostic specimen to properly identify and possibly rename it as a new species.

The fossil unearthed by Richard Budd is over a metre in diameter and contains both positive and negative impressions.  It is massive in size, weighing over 2300 kg including the matrix.  The large -scale ribs and the smooth inner whorls are tell-tale signs of the genus “Titanites?”, very similar to the Coal Creek find.

These animals lived in the shallow seas that covered parts of British Columbia during the late Jurassic Period, some 150 million years ago.  They were fast moving, predatory cephalopods, with large eyes and numerous long tentacles protruding from the opening in the large end of their shell (imagine a giant coiled squid).  When they died in the sea, gasses from their rotting flesh would accumulate in their shell, causing them to float and drift with the currents, where they would eventually come to rest on a sandy beach.  The soft parts of their body would have disappeared, leaving only the hard calcified shell, which would have filled with sand due to tidal action.  Over time, it would have been buried and eventually fossilized.  The sandy beach that entombed the Coal Mountain Ammonite, 150 million years later is mined as the Moose Mountain Sandstone, which forms the footwall of the Kootenay Formation coal deposit at Coal Mountain.

The Giant Ammonite find at Coal Mountain is obviously very significant.  Elk Valley Coal Corporation (head office in Calgary, Alberta) has subsequently donated the specimen to the Courtenay and District Museum and Paleontology Centre in Courtenay,  British Columbia where it can be studied by paleontologists.  The original fossil will remain on display at the museum.  A cast of the specimen is planned to be financed by EVCC and eventually displayed in the Canadian Coal Discovery Centre in Sparwood, BC, where the public can view and enjoy this unique local find. 

The Canadian Coal Discovery Centre has been a work in progress for several years, with construction to be completed next year. The Elk Valley Coal Discovery Centre will showcase, interpret and preserve the story of coal and create a legacy for the area. The Centre will present an interpretive heritage experience which does not currently exist in the Elk Valley.

For the purposes of the fundraising campaign, the CCDC Society adopted the ‘ammonite’ symbol as the branding for the Centre, which represents the beginning of coal 150 million years ago. The Coal Mountain “Titanites” ammonite cast, as a result, will have a very prominent location in the new Canadian Coal Discovery Centre that all Elk Valley Coal employees and their families can be proud of.

Brad D. Pisony

Senior Quality Technologist

Elk Valley Coal Corporation

Coal Mountain Operations

This is where Palcoprep became involved. It soon became obvious that the original fossil was too heavy to be put on display in the museum in Courtenay. Palcoprep was contracted to prepare two casts of the original fossil. We travelled to Courtenay and fabricated a mold of the original fossil. The mold was brought back to our shop in Drumheller. From that mold we manufactured two accurate casts of the fossil. These casts were reinforced and mounted onto an armature for public display. One of the casts was delivered to Courtenay for display in the the Courtenay and District Museum and Palaeontology Center. The other was delivered to the Canadian Coal Discovery Center in Sparwood, British Columbia.

 

Once the casts had been completed, I photographed them both in Black and White, and in color...

At the end of the project I prepared a number of Fine Art Prints from one of the black and white negatives that I had taken of the completed casts.  These were archivally processed silver gelatin prints originally captured on film with a medium format camera.  The prints were mounted, matted and framed.  One hangs in the Canadian Coal Discovery Center in Sparwood with the one of the casts.  Another was presented to the shovel operator that found the original fossil, and yet another to one of the individuals that lobbied to have this fossil recognized.  A print was also presented to Teck Coal, who supported this project every step of the way.  We also have one at the Palcoprep office in Drumheller.

Dinosaur Extinction Challenged

There was an interesting article in the newspaper this morning that challenges the theory of the mass extinction of the Dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago....

Collecting the Bison

In July of 2010 Frank and I decided to collect a modern skeleton of a Plains Bison.  My cousin had run a Bison ranch near Wetaskiwin for a number of years.  He eventually sold his herd and moved to Innisfail to operate a grain handling terminal.  But, he told us of an 8 year old bull that had died in the back corner of his pasture a couple of years prior.  We wanted to collect the skeleton and as Frank was up in the city for the day, we decided to head out in the evening and see if we could find it.  My cousin Victor had given us a pretty detailed description of where the carcass could be found.  I knew the area well as my cousin and I used to ride snowmobiles there when we were kids.  We really didn't know exactly what we would be doing with the skeleton, but we wanted to collect it while the opportunity presented itself.  We could use it to produce a skeletal mount of a complete modern Plains Bison, or use the post cranial material to put together with a different skull, and prepare a mount of an extinct ice age bison.  Of course in July it is light until well into the evening so we had plenty of time to try and locate it, and hopefully collect it.  We parked on the side of the road and hiked the 1/2 mile in to the back corner of the pasture.  As it had been a wet summer thus far the grass was lush and up to six feet tall in places.

As we wandered about in that tall grass it very quickly became obvious that it was not going to be as easy to find the carcass as we had thought.  The grass was very tall, there was no smell, and nothing obvious to suggest where the old bull might have died.  But then by luck Frank stumbled over a femur.  Not only was the area lush with tall grass, but also with stinging nettles.  We beat some of them down and discovered an inconspicuous mound that must have been the carcass.  We were surprised at how little was left of it after only two years.  We quickly decided that there was enough time to try and collect what bones we could find, but that we would need to gather a few supplies.  So, we hiked the half mile back to the truck and drove in to the Walmart in Wetaskiwin.  We were somewhat dishevelled, sweaty and dirty as we purchased a rake and a box of garbage bags.  We joked that it was a good thing we we're also buying a tin of lye as we would have been suspects for having a body to dispose of.  On the contrary, it was the opposite that was our intention. We drove back out to the pasture and did that 1/2 mile hike one more time.  We used the rake to beat down the nettles and the grass and to pull apart the overgrown mound.  Paydirt...!!  We soon discovered the bones of that old Bison bull.

We bagged up everything we could find and packed it out of the pasture to the trucks.  It took us two trips to carry out all the bones.  We remarked that it was amazing that the bones of an animal that weighed nearly a ton when it was alive, could be carried out in a few garbage bags, by two guys, in a couple of trips.  That short 1/2 mile walk out to the back corner of the pasture seemed pretty long by the time we were done as we each walked it six times that evening.  The last couple of trips out we were pretty loaded down.  We joked again that is was a good thing that no one was around watching us.  What would any of the neighbors think if they saw two grubby looking guys walking into a pasture with a rake and then walking out with garbage bags full of heavy stuff??  Frank loaded all the bones in his truck and headed home for Drumheller.  I packed myself into my truck and headed back into the city.  By this time it was starting to get dark.  The next day, back at the shop in Drumheller, Frank went through all the bones to see what we had.  We did not have the skull, but we knew that my cousin had already collected that a year prior.  The post cranial material was over 95% complete.  We were missing a couple of the tail vertebra, a rib or two, and a few foot bones.  We intended to go back out in the fall when the grass died back and sweep the area one more time.  We never did get around to it, but maybe in the spring before things green up we can get back out there.  Frank laid out all the bones back in the shop and took this photograph...

Later in the fall we borrowed the skull from my cousin so that we could take a mold off of it to make some casts.  Eventually when that process is complete, the original skull and horn sheaths will be returned to my cousin.  This skull is enormous, with the spread of the horns measuring 21" from tip to tip, and over 27" at the widest part of the curve!  We were pleasantly surprised at how clean everything was.  Almost every little bit of tissue had been cleaned away by the maggots, grubs and beetles leaving all the bones virtually spotless.  A stroke of luck on our part.  We will store these bones away and see if we can't find a project to use them on.

King's Point Visitor Pavilion

Here is an image of the completed installation of the Humpback Whale skeleton at the Visitor's Pavilion in King's Point, Newfoundland.  Although the whale mount is complete, obviously the pavilion itself is still undergoing the final stages of construction and finishing.

King's Point Humpback

 

The second Visitor Pavilion project that Palcoprep was involved in is in King's Point, Newfoundland.  We mounted the skeleton of a Humpback Whale.  This specimen, at 45 feet, was more than 15% larger than the Sperm Whale that we mounted in Triton.  This project was completed in 2009.  I was not able to photograph as much of the process as I had previously done with the Triton project.  I did visit the shop in Drumheller when the assembly was well underway and took a number of photographs of the work in progress.  I was particularly amazed at the size of the flippers, and the jaws.  These were enormous... and the humpback isn't anywhere near the largest of the whale species.  Just imagine the size of the big ones, the Fin and the Blue.  If we ever getting involved in mounting one of these, we'll need a bigger shop!

Triton Visitor Pavilion

The photograph above shows the completed installation of the Sperm Whale skeleton in the newly completed Visitor Pavilion in Triton, Newfoundland.  Pretty impressive if I do say so myself!!

Sperm Whale Project

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is in the process of putting together a network of tourist pavilions along the east coast of the island of Newfoundland.  These are being located in some of the smaller towns including Triton, King's Point, Middle Arm and LaScie.  These buildings are to serve as Visitor Information Centers and are to focus on the local interests including whale watching and iceberg watching.  A mounted skeleton of a different species of whale is to be included in each pavilion.  Palcoprep has been contracted to prepare and mount the first two whale skeletons.  The first was a Sperm Whale for the pavilion in Triton.  This specimen is 38 feet long, and was completed in 2008.  The second was the skeleton of a Humpback Whale for the pavilion in King's Point.  This specimen is 45 feet long and was completed in 2009.

The following images illustrate the work that took place on the Triton Sperm Whale.  It was quite a job...  First the bones were transported from Newfoundland to Drumheller.  The bones all had to be cleaned and sorted to determine whether any were missing.  Then a structural steel armature had to be constructed to support the mounted skeleton.  Some of the missing components had to be sculpted and painted.  When everything was complete, the skeleton had to be knocked down and packaged for transport back to Newfoundland and the eventual installation.  Everything went smoothly and the finished mount looks really good.