Every farm family has its own special place – a place to walk, to sit, a place to go for quiet time, to recharge the batteries. Our special place is the coulee behind our farm.
We walk there at all times of the year. It is visible from just about every room in our house and we glory in its scenery as it changes through the seasons.
I have often sat on the side of a coulee hill and wondered about others who may have sat here before, what they thought, how they lived.
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This summer, we visited a coulee much like ours in the southeast corner of the province. There, we watched the jaw of a long-extinct mammal, one which resembled a rhinoceros, being unearthed with a dental pick.
The site was near Eastend, where in 1991 the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex was found.
Finding fossils was nothing new in the Eastend area; people had been doing it for years. They just had never found anything this big before.
T-Rex was the largest predator ever to roam the earth. The name means tyrant lizard and it was probably just that. It weighed as much as two adult elephants and measured up to 45 feet from jaw to tail. It was also bowlegged, at least the Eastend example was.
The Eastend T-Rex skeleton is believed to be about 65 million years old; it is one of the three most complete of the dozen or so skeletons found worldwide to date.
The finding of the skeleton was a boon for Eastend; it not only brought the press and tourists in droves, but it also brought the Eastend Fossil Research Station, where pieces of the T-Rex still lie waiting to be picked out of their plaster casts.
Tourists still visit Eastend to view the station and tour to the nearby sites where other fossil bones are being excavated.
The tour to the fossil bones takes about two hours and costs $20.
Necessary accoutrements include a hat and sunscreen, and of course a camera. On hot days a bottle of cool water would not go amiss.
There are also a number of other things to do and see in and around Eastend and some excellent guides to what is there.
The community has taken advantage of a chance discovery and made the most of it. Every community can’t be as lucky, but a visit to Eastend certainly opens one’s eyes to our long history and to what can be done with it.
Who knows what secrets our coulee might give up one day?
