CALGARY -- It looked like any old platter-sized stone that Radek Pyzalski pried off of a larger rock April 16, when the family was out for a hike east of Carstairs. It turned out to be about as ancient as a rock can get, estimated by a paleo botanist to be somewhere between 62 and 63 million years old.
The 6-year-old carried the rock for some distance with the intention to toss it into the Rosebud River. But the rock was a little too big for the boy and his mom Shannon Pyzalski thought her son should just leave it be.
That’s when he dropped it for a third time and it happened to flip over.
“We looked down and I was like whoa! There’s something on there," said Pyzalski. “So I called everyone over and said you guys, I think Radek just found a fossil.”
The family was out on Shannon’s partner's farm, near Olds. Bruce Brittain grew up on the property and had visited the site in the coulee many times. He never dreamed a fossil could be found there.
“There’s these rocks all up and down and along here so you can see the trails and we just walked up and down just like he (Radek) did and played with the rocks and he just happened to flip the right one over I guess,” said Brittain.
Shannon, her daughter Avie and sons Riston and Radek wanted to have a picnic and didn’t dream of finding something millions of years old.
“It’s exciting, it’s something fun, it’s something happy for once in this world we are in right now,” said Pyzalski.
The family sent an email to the Royal Tyrrell Museum about the find and received a quick response. The Drumheller museum doesn’t have a paleobotanist on staff, so it contacted Dr. David Greenwood at Brandon University in Manitoba.
After studying images of the fossilized leaf, Greenwood said it’s likely a leaf of an ancient sycamore or hickory. Those are trees that can be found today on the east coast of North America.
Data points
Craig Scott, the Director of Preservation and Research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, said fossils found in the province belong to all Albertans not just the finder, even if it’s discovered on private property.
‘We encourage people that when they find fossils to contact us because they could be very important,” Said Scott. “The more people that contact us with their discoveries, they provide more data points for us so we get more and more information every time someone tells us about fossils that they’ve discovered.”
Scott says the rock in the area where the discovery was made is approximately 63 to 62 million years old and that’s not long after the dinosaurs went extinct.
“Most of that part of the province was covered in subtropical forests so it's not unusual to find specimens of some of those trees that were living back in that time,” said Scott.
The Pyzalski family and Radek are enjoying their time with the fossil for as long as they have it and can’t wait to see it on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum one day with Radek given credit for its discovery.
