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Ten coolest dinosaur discoveries in Canada

Find out which dinosaur was named after an Alberta paleontologist’s wife

Hadrosaur (Shutterstock)

1. Albertosaurus sarcophagus: In 1884, Joseph B. Tyrrell discovered the first major dinosaur in Canada. The skull he dug up turned out to be a meat-eating dinosaur and an earlier, close relative of Tyrannosaurus rex.

2. Thescelosaurus assiniboiensis: Discovered in Saskatchewan in 1968, it took 40 years to determine the partial skeleton was a new species of plant-eating dinosaur 66 million years old.

3. Eotriceratops xerinsularis: In 2001, Glen Guthrie, a camp cook at Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, discovered a nasal horn core belonging to a ceratopsian dinosaur. It is believed famed U.S fossil hunter Barnum Brown passed over this discovery in 1910 in search of more impressive discoveries.

4. Edmontosaurus species: In 1917, Lawrence Lambe discovered two partial skeletons while digging along the Edmonton formation, now known as the Horseshoe Canyon formation. The location of Lambe’s discovery lends Edmontosaurus species its name.

5. Centrosaurus apertus: In 1904, paleontologist Lawrence Lambe discovered the first centrosaurus remains along the Red Deer River in Alberta.

6. Hadrosaur: Grassland National Park was the site where the first dinosaur fossil was found in Canada. In 1874, pioneer geologist George Dawson discov- ered Canada’s first dinosaur bones, those belonging to a hadrosaurian “duck-billed” dinosaur, in the Killdeer Badlands.

7. Unescopceratops koppelhusae: Discovered by University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie in 1995, the new species was recently named after his wife Eva Koppelhus. It is believed that Unescopceratops koppelhusae lived about 75 million years ago, weighed less than 91 kg and grew to the same size as a deer.

8. Euoplocephalus tutus: Specimens of this squat, armoured dinosaur were discovered in 1902 by Lawrence Lambe. It was officially classified in 1910.

9. Parasaurolophus: Canadian William Parks discovered the genus of this odd-headed dinosaur with a swooping crest in 1922.

10. Ankylosaur: On March 23, 2011, a shovel operator discovered bones, believed to be of this group of dinosaurs and thought to be 110 million years old, at a Suncor Energy mine north of Fort McMurray, Alta.

Sources: Royal Tyrrell Museum; Royal Ontario Museum; news reports; Canadian Museum of Nature

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