Tumbler Ridge is known for its dinosaur trackways.
Back in 2000, Daniel Helm and Mark Turner made the first discovery while tubing down Flatbed Creek.
Since then, hundreds of footprints across dozens of sites have been found, the majority falling into three main categories: theropods, which are meat-eating dinosaurs that walked on their hind legs, and included the king of all dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus Rex, ornithopods, which were also two legged herbivores, and the ankylosaurids, which were large armoured dinosaurs that walked on their four-toed feet.
Or at least, many of them did. But for a while now the folks here in Tumbler Ridge have known of a half dozen or so ankylosaur trackways with only three toes.
Now, with the help of Victoria Arbour, the Curator of Palaeontology at the Royal BC Museum, these tracks have been analyzed, catogorized and identified as a new brand of ankylosaurid: the Ruopodosaurus clava, or “the tumbled-down lizard with a club/mace.” The “tumbled-down” section a reference to Tumbler Ridge.
The footprints are 100-million-year-old, and have been found both here and at one site in Alberta.
There are two primary groups of ankylosaurs. Nodosaurid ankylosaurs were ankylosaurs with a flexible tail and four toes, while ankylosaurid ankylosaurs have a sledgehammer-like tail club, and only three toes on their feet.
This is not the first ankylosaur discovered in Canada. Indeed, fossils from the Tetrapodosaurus borealis are found all across North America. But these are Nodosaurids which have four toes. And fossils of ankylosaurid ankylosaur have been found elsewhere in the world, mostly Asia, though there have also been some fossils found in Southeastern Alberta, Saskatchewan and south as far as Wyoming. But the tracks from Tumbler Ridge (and that one in Alberta) are the first known examples of ankylosaurid ankylosaur footprints anywhere in the world.
“While we don’t know exactly what the dinosaur that made Ruopodosaurus footprints looked like, we know that it would have been about 5-6 metres long, spiky and armoured, and with a stiff tail or a full tail club,” says Arbour, an evolutionary biologist and vertebrate palaeontologist who specializes in the study of ankylosaurs. “Ankylosaurs are my favourite group of dinosaurs to work on, so being able to identify new examples of these dinosaurs in British Columbia is really exciting for me.”
In 2023, Dr Charles Helm, who is the scientific advisor at the Tumbler Ridge Museum, invited Arbour to check out the tracks when she was visiting town, and together with Helm, Eamon Drysdale, curator at the Tumbler Ridge Museum, Roy Rule, geoscientist at the Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark, and the late Martin Lockley, formerly of the University of Colorado, authored a new paper, which was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology last month.
According to Arbour, the tracks date back to the middle of the Cretaceous period, about 100 to 94 million years ago. This timeframe represents a significant gap in the fossil record in North America, leading some to suspect the creatures disappeared from North America during this time.
But this finding helps plug that gap, showing that they didn’t disappear, but were alive and well during this gap in the fossil record.
A specimen was removed from near the Wolverine site last year and formed the basis of the research. “Over the years, we began to realize that some ankylosaur tracks had four toes and others three, but we did not realize how globally unique this was,” says Helm. “It was the late Martin Lockley who first pointed out that this was worth reporting and publishing on it. Martin is the (posthumous) second author on the recently published paper. Victoria Arbour was a great leader and has a wealth of knowledge about ankylosaurs, so it was a great team effort, and wonderful to see our local scientists Eamon Drysdale and Roy Rule also being co-authors. Once we knew what we were documenting, we did photogrammetry of all the three-toed specimens in the museum collections and out at field sites, and the resulting 3D colour images were all published in the paper.”
Considering how much of Tumbler Ridge’s fame in paleontological spheres is built on trackways, Helm is excited for what this means. “This has enormous potential for Tumbler Ridge—our own dinosaur track,” he says. “Already it forms the ‘Stomp of Approval’ for the Type 2 diabetes remission project, and I hope that other community groups also adopt Ruopodosaurus clava.”
This study, says Arbour, gives us a new piece of the puzzle about the ancient creatures that once roamed what is now Canada. “It also highlights how important the Peace Region of northeastern BC is for understanding the evolution of dinosaurs in North America—there’s still lots more to be discovered.” she says.
Above photo: Illustration copyright Sydney Mohr.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
