Dinosaur Provincial Park in the badlands of southern Alberta is a popular destination for bone hunters from around the world, but the recent discovery of a hadrosaur fossil is generating a lot more excitement than usual.

Kaskie volunteers at a field school in the park run by Brian Pickles, a professor at the University of Reading in England. He and his colleagues bring students from the UK and Australia to learn and test field techniques in Alberta.

Kaskie came across a cliff and noticed a fossilized bone sticking out. Upon closer inspection, he realized that it was larger and more intact than anything he had ever seen.

“I immediately reached out to Brian and, like, you have to come see this! And it turned out that it was a really cool thing,” Kaskie said.

What he found was a young hadrosaur so well preserved that it still had skin on it. Pickles knew it was an important find, and it came to the attention of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alta.

Experts say hadrosaur skeletons are common in the area, but finding one as well preserved as Kaskie’s is very rare. “We take so many pH τos. We sent them to the staff at the Royal Tyrrell Museum [and said], ‘Hey, I think we found something really big here,’” Pickles said.

Skin on fossils ‘quite rare’ When it comes to dinosaurs, Alberta has a rich fossil heritage, according to Caleb Brown, curator of dinosaur systematics and evolution at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

“Dinosaur Provincial Park is kind of the crown jewel of that. There is no other place in the world that has the same abundance of dinosaur fossils and the same diversity of dinosaur fossils in a very small area.”

Hadrosaurs were duck-billed herbivorous dinosaurs, commonly known as cows of the Cretaceous period.

According to Brown, between 400 and 500 dinosaur skeletons or skulls have been excavated in the area. So finding dinosaur bones in the area is not difficult. But finding one where all the bones are still in the same position as they would be in life is rare.

“And finding one that has a lot of fur is pretty rare.”