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First Tyrannosaurus Rex Tooth, Scollard Formation, Alberta


dingo2

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I took a trip out to the scollard formation in Alberta the other day for the first time. I've been hunting in Alberta for years now, but only recently decided to try and branch out from our old hunting grounds. I was unaware that there were T-Rex fossils in our province, but I read through a few old posts on this forum about some massive teeth being pulled out of Alberta so I decided it was worth a shot. I told my dad about it and we decided to drive out on his birthday.

 

I ended up finding a few broken T-Rex teeth, one would have been well over 3 inches. My dad easily had the find of the day with this intact tooth. Probably the best birthday present one could recieve.

 

We will definitely be going back soon, but I want to educate myself on the scollard more before we go again. I was planning to be able to identify the whitemud, battle formation, and kneehills tuff, but failed in practice. If anybody here has explored the scollard in the past, I'd love to get some pointers on navigating, as you can only run up and down the hoodoos so many times before you're done for the day.

20200926_165952.jpg

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Awesome, tyrannosaur teeth are always cool

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Wow, really nice find. Are you hunting along the Red Deer River?

 

Also, I'm not sure about how the Whitemud formation appears in Alberta, but here in Saskatchewan it's pretty easy to distinguish, because, well:

 

whitemud1.JPG.0eb87961f7607bbc8658266b18239a8a.JPG

 

whitemud2.JPG.18fccb2e01410f12b963b0c4b74a1b3a.JPG

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Yeah, I'm hunting along the red deer river. I read through this document to get some info on identifying where the Scollard formation starts and ends.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/111826#page/8/mode/1up

Those pictures you posted are pretty cool. I definitely didn't see any areas that were nearly that white, but we must have been on the Scollard at times since we found quite a few teeth. I read that on the red deer river the battle formation sits atop the whitemud formation, so I intended to looked for that. The kneehill tuff is supposed to be sitting towards the top of the battle formation, where the Scollard begins. That didnt really work out like I planned as I couldn't comfortably identify the any of the three sections.

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I can't speak exactly for the region you were in, but I do know that the boundaries between formations in the Red Deer River are often delineated by coal seams, as these were charted quite extensively by mining companies early in the 20th century. These are often the best obvious visual markers between units - from what I recall, the base of the Scollard sits on a fairly prominent coal seam, but this may also only apply to specific geographic regions.

 

You should keep looking for regional geology reports, and study up on the nomenclature and methods they use to classify these units. It can be a really rewarding "aha!" moment when you recognise a feature in the field that you had only previously read about in the reports.

 

(Also be aware that the Horseshoe Canyon formation in that area also bears teeth, and that you aren't mixing it up with the Scollard by accident)...

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15 hours ago, Norki said:

I can't speak exactly for the region you were in, but I do know that the boundaries between formations in the Red Deer River are often delineated by coal seams, as these were charted quite extensively by mining companies early in the 20th century.

(Also be aware that the Horseshoe Canyon formation in that area also bears teeth, and that you aren't mixing it up with the Scollard by accident)...

Yeah in the document I linked they also talk about measuring down from the No. 14 coal seam to identify where the Scollard is. I'll have do some reading on how to differentiate the various coal seams, as I had previously thought that it would be much harder to do that than just find the whitemud/battle formations.

I've searched the horseshoe canyon, as well as other formations in Alberta many times, and I'm very confident this tooth was from the scollard. I've found quite a few tyrannosaurus teeth, but the largest were always less than 2 inches. I think they were Albertosaurus. On this site, we found 3 teeth that were over 2.75 inches, leading me to believe they were actually from a T-Rex.

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On 9/27/2020 at 2:26 PM, dingo2 said:

This one would have been a monster! Its got the blue markings that signify a tooth from the scollard from what I've read.

20200927_122231.jpg

Awesome!!

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