FARMERS, DINOSAURS, AND THE EASTEND MUSEUM

 I started this blog over ten years ago, and it hinged on two initial places: my fangirling of Rick Steves in  his home town of Edmonds, WA, and an elevating visit to a friend and her family in Eastend, SK. I realize now that I should have celebrated that anniversary, and noted the 1000's blog entry!

Tonight, I am returning to Eastend, to piece together a story about a farmer who married my friend, his uncle, some dinosaur bones, and a little town museum called the Eastend Historical Museum.

I don't know what kid doesn't get a little obsessed with dinosaurs. Growing up in Regina, we had a mechanical roaring dinosaur in our provincial natural history museum. My parents took our family to Drumheller, AB one summer to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum near there. I have visited the New York Natural History museum and shown the skeletons to my daughter in various places, not least of which is an outdoor walk at the Granby Zoo.

Our favourite museum to house dinosaurs became McGill's Redpath Museum, a treasure trove of many curiosities, not least of which is a Triceratops skull called "Sara", that was discovered in Eastend.

When I visited my friend years ago, I enjoyed visiting the Eastend Museum a lot. There were two things were really memorable: a woman's group called the Rebekah Lodge (I had never heard of a sisterhood equivalent to all the fraternal lodges I had heard of over the years), and the discovery of dinosaur bones near my friend's farm.

I went to University with Krista, and we attended the same church, frequenting the College and Career Group many weekends. She moved to Eastend after she married Warren, a farmer with family who also farmed in the area. On the wall of the museum, there was a display including photos about the fossil find of a 60% complete skeleton of a Brontothere, a prehistoric animal that resembles a rhino with a split horn. Thanks to the local enthusiasm of an amateur paleontologist named Corky Jones, people in the area were inspired to keep an eye open for unusual finds in the area. One day in 1973, near the farm of my friend Warren's Uncle Bud, road repairs done by neighbour Ken Wills unearthed some bones. Bud, Ken, and another neighbour named Victor collected the Brontothere's bones. They are displayed in the museum, along with cast of a Triceratops skull and the "second shield" of a Torosaurus.

On following visits, we were able to visit the larger museum called T.rex Discovery Centre, opened in 1991 in part due to another discovery even more impressive of a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex that became known as "Scotty". 

What I have learned over the years is that fossils are incredibly heavy, too heavy to be displayed as a skeleton of a dinosaur. Most of what we like to see on display are casts of the fossils, allowing them to hang suspended from the ceiling, or stand impressively in museum rooms to be admired. 

The showstopper at Redpath Museum

If you do have the chance though, visit a dinosaur museum near you. Ask if you can hold a fossil and compare it to a cast, so you can feel the difference in weight. Notice what is a fossil, what is a bone, and what is a casting. And you can touch the coprolites without even getting your hands dirty! That is some heavy @#$%!