Tylosaur on permanent display at Swift Current Museum

The replica fossil of a 65 million year old ferocious reptile related to modern day lizards has found a permanent home at the Swift Current Museum, a short distance from its 1994 discovery site in the hills of Lake Diefenbaker.

A 10 metre (35 foot) long tylosaur is currently on permanent display at Swift Current Museum, with its unveiling this past Saturday eliciting wide-eyed stares from youngsters in attendance at the grand opening. The reptile's bones were discovered in 1994 close to the Herbert Ferry Regional Park by Oliver Johnson.

"It's really a spectacular looking thing...35 feet long...it's an eating machine," noted Swift Current Museum Curator Lloyd Begley. "We're very fortunate that it was available for us, that the tylosaur was looking for a home and we were able to enter into an agreement with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum."

While two other replica fossils continue to tour as part of the Hunter of the Prairie Sea exhibition, it was agreed Swift Current should play host to the third replica as the original bones were found in the Southwest.

Tim Tokaryk, Head of the Paleontology Program (Acting) at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum's Fossil Research Station in Eastend, admitted that Saskatchewan's fossilized finds are important for a number of reasons.

"It illustrates that we have a historical record that goes back millions of years, and that in order to understand the diversity of life before us, as well as the adaptability of species to extreme environments, we can then use that information to understand what's going on today with diversity change," Tokaryk said during Saturday's unveiling.

"Each piece of that puzzle - each skeleton, each bone - helps us recreate that snapshot of life millions of years ago. And the more snapshots we have the better we can understand the evolution of ecosystems and evolution of species across large periods of time, across extreme environment events. And of course this one is an extreme example of what happens, it was quite successful when it was around, but it was unable to adapt to an extinction event 65 million years ago when a meteorite hit the earth and caused global havoc. So we can understand who survived, to an extent why they survived, and why the ones that went extinct, that's our goal."

The Southwest has been a key location for a variety of helpful discoveries.

"A lot of our resources are from the Southwest. That's because the paleontologists need exposure of a bedrock. Rolling hills don't do it because we can't sort of see into the hill," he explained. "In Saskatchewan we're not generally known as the place to go for fossils. But we are becoming that with discoveries like this and the more discoveries we're making every year."

Southwest a key to some puzzle pieces.

Tokaryk was involved in the excavation process in Eastend, where the recovery of the Scotty T.rex turned out to be Canada's most complete Tyrannosaurus rex.

He was also one of the original individuals to visit the site of the tylosaur back in 1994 shortly after it was found.

"We realized right away that there were bones in sequence going into the hill, which is a good indicator there's going to be more in the hill."

Over the summer of 1995 workers began the excavation of the site, the process which is the quick part of the recovery.

"The long part of it is when you bring it back to the lab and start piecing the stuff together. Fossils, by nature, are extremely fragile. You don't pick them up like potatoes. They're very fragile - and so it's a long process of removing the rock from the fossil, gluing it as you go. And can you imagine doing that to a 30-foot animal with 200 plus bones, it's a very long process."

The fact that this fossil was so well preserved made the discovery just that much more interesting.

"The original skull has a little bit of crushing, but it's so well preserved that the sclerotic rings, these are the boney plates in the eye, are still there - is quite revealing. In fact that we also found bits and pieces of a smaller, different species of mosasaur, in it's stomach region, we have an idea of actually what his last meal was."

While tylosaurs are relatively common in the southern United States, there were previously not many recovered from the northern part of the Western Interior Seaway which cut across North America and covered present day Saskatchewan.

A Masters Student from the University of Alberta completed his thesis on the fossil, and a soon to be published paper will explain why this tylosaur is unique to the province and northern part of fauna that existed 75 million years ago.

"When we have more specific ideas of the diversity of life 65 million years ago, again that picture, that snapshot becomes a little more clearer. So we're trying to understand just based on those little pieces of fossil, and those skeletons of fossil, what was happening millions of years ago," Tokaryk noted.