Massive Dinosaur Tail Fossil Unearthed By Construction Crew On Alberta Pipeline

A totally composed dinosaur tail was unearthed in Canada by a worker on a gas pipeline.

A construction worker thought he chipped a piece of rock with his backhoe-and realized he'd broken off a piece of a dinosaur fossil instead.

"What we have is a totally composed tail," Brian Brake, executive director of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, told press. "It's beautiful."

The worker, who is part of a crew in Alberta, British Columbia, was moving earth with the backhoe when he ran into the dinosaur's tail, which is nearly 100 feet long.

And that's not all-the tail may belong to a 35-foot dinosaur still fossilized within the ancient rock.

The tail, which was buried about 5 feet underground, is very fragile. It is likely part of a hadrosaur. Hadrosaurs were plant eaters with duck-billed heads and among the last dinosaurs to roam the earth, over 65 million years ago.

Once the backhoe operator realized that it was a dinosaur fossil, he stopped digging immediately. Paleontologists were then brought to the site, which is near Spirit River, Alberta. "As we walked around it, we saw this whole part of a tail of a dinosaur. To see something like that is pretty incredible," paleontologist Matthew Vavrek told press. "The last time I've seen something like that was in a museum. I've never found something like this before."

However, because of the fragility of the tail, it must be handled with extreme care. "You handle it carefully, or it's just going to shatter," Vavrek said.

Construction workers are helping with the recovery effort, but it may be weeks or months before the scientists know what else is there.

. "We don't know for sure that the rest of the animal is there," Vavrek said. "Sometimes, all you get is what you see."

However, this is the second unexpected find of a dinosaur in Canada in as many months. In August, scientists found a headless 73-million-year-old hadrosaur in British Columbia. It's the most complete dinosaur skeleton found in the province.

"It used to be thought, mainly by people in B.C., that British Columbia doesn't have dinosaurs," paleontologist Richard McCrea said. "It does obviously have them, now, but they're not in easy-to-get places."

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