When Shawn Funk was working at his normal construction job, he wasn't expecting to uncover anything unusual—that is, until his crane his a big rock. What followed that initial bump in the road would not only just change Shawn's life but also all of human history, forever...
Shawn Funk
Shawn Funk wasn't expecting much from another day on his job site. At the time, he was employed by and working for the energy company Suncor. He and the rest of the construction crew were working inside of the Millennium Mine. This mine is found only about 17 miles north of Alberta, Canada's Fort McMurray. Shawn was working on the backhoe when his life would change forever...
Deep Mining
The company was given the task of collecting the crude oil deep within the mines. It seemed like pretty straightforward work at the time, and so Shawn and the team quickly got to digging. Using his machine to cut through dense layers of rock and sand, Shawn was unaware of what lay underneath his crane. This wasn't just any old soil. It was actually once filled with animals, plants, and marine life hundreds of millions of years ago...
Crude Oil
Crude oil might sound like oil with an edgy side, but it actually has a rich history. Once the plants and animals that occupy the land die, their bodies settle under the sea, finding their final resting place at the bottom of the ocean. Over time, heat and pressure are added and corpses are transformed into hydrocarbons, thus creating crude oil. Shawn had no idea that this crude oil would lead him to something unbelievable.
Humming Tune
Shawn was content to be hauling rock, oil, and sand for the remainder of his job. If anything seemed even remotely out of the ordinary, it became big news to the rest of the guys at the site. So when backhoe manager Shawn returned to his station after taking a small break, he was perplexed by the noise his machine was making. The machine was making a bizarre humming sound...
Not Right
In his 12 years of work, Shawn's experiences with the past have been pretty limited. Occasionally he ran into a petrified tree stump or two, but these weren't anything special. Not only that, but they definitely didn't cause his backhoe to make this strange buzzing sound. Shawn could tell something was not right with his tool...
Strange Rock
Shawn excavated whatever was underneath his machine, hoping to find some answer for the humming. At first glance, the unearthed object appeared to be a weird-looking rock. However, it wasn't until he flipped the rock over that he noticed the strange pattern underneath. There were small disc shapes on the bottom of the object. This left the crew with only more peculiar questions...
Calling Authorities
Shawn knew it was time to get someone in charge of the site. Who knew what this thing could be, what if it was dangerous? He didn't want to risk any danger, or even worse, getting in major trouble with his boss. The executives on the scene made a call to the Royal Tyrrell Museum, who realized that Shawn's discovery wasn't just a weird rock. It was actually something very rare and powerful...
Twelve Hours
The museum flew two technicians out to look at the site up close. Together, Shawn and the tech team were able to discover the area and initial object that these strange rocks came from. The Suncor excavators proved to be very helpful during the mission, as they and the museum technicians spent 12 hours working on the rock. They began hacking away at the rock mass, which was estimated to be 15,000 pounds.
Finally Unearthed
When all was said and done, there was finally some progress being made. After several hours of hard manual labor, they freed the rock accretion. With the help of some cranes, the Suncor team lifted it out of the ground and up to the surface. As they lowered it to the eager technicians, the 7.5-ton mass dropped suddenly and shattered on the ground. Scared for a moment, they soon realized this revealed a paleontologist’s paradise…
What's Inside?
Inside the rock wasn't any pirate treasure or gold coins, but it was certainly something special. It was a broken egg! Inside were the remains of a prehistoric organism. The techs were tasked with finding out exactly what kind of organism it was. The had to put together the shattered pieces like a puzzle...
Dino Bones
The creature that once roamed the earth looked to be some sort of dinosaur. Archeologists were baffled at the shape and size of the beast. It was about nine feet tall and had almost no visible bones. This was because this wasn't just any olf dinosaur fossil, it was completely petrified! This is what happens when an old, buried object turns to stone overtime...
Baffled Techs
Shawn was amazed by his incredible find, but the technicians were stuck on how it was even possible. A dinosaur fossil that far down would have to be very well preserved to get to that state. It was essentially mummified, stuck in time forever, just waiting to be found. It was extremely rare to discover something like this, but they still wanted their questions answered, so they got down to business and started researching...
Testing
While Shawn would have loved to hold onto his unearthed dinosaur, the pieces were taken back to the technicians base at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. There, the petrified dino would undergo various testing and research. After some initial examinations, it was determined that the creature was alive somewhere around 110 million years ago! They also found it was an armored plant-eater type.
Canadian Born
The researchers realized that armored plant-eaters were typically found in parts of western Canada, so they began looking there for similarities. After some studying, they decided that what they had on their hands was a beast from the genus Ankylosaurus. After dying in western Canada those millions of years ago, it was likely swept away by a flood and sank to the bottom of an ocean from the prehistoric era.
Reconstruction Reveal
The scientists wanted to make a visual reconstruction of the animal to understand what they were dealing with. After the herbivore was fully reconstructed, it was quickly revealed that the creature had four stubby legs, an armor-plated back, and was covered in spikes all over. Most likely, it also had a long tail covered in points as well. It wasn't any fossil, they found a brand new species-- the Nodosaur!
Heavy Hitter
This creature wasn't a small one either. If anything it was massive, and not just because it stood over nine feet tall. When the Nodosaur was alive, it probably weighed about 3,000 pounds. Mummified in its stone-like petrified state, the dinosaur weighs just around 2,500 pounds. From what they can gather based on the evidence, paleontologists believe it would have been fairly solitary in nature.
Very Intact
While most bones of the past are barely preserved, this one came in almost it's complete form. Even crazier was how intact it was after being drown beneath a prehistoric ocean for millions of years in a flood. No one knows how this is even possible, as this kind of thing might even be considered a miracle! Nevertheless, the nearly perfect state of being protected by substrate gave scientists quite a look into the past...
A Look Inside
Thanks to the fullly formed condition it was in, researchers and archeologists were able to use the best scans to get the clearest look inside the hard exoskeleton of the dinosaur. With this tool and imaging, the team was able to see the internal bone structure and even some parts of the beast’s stomach, figuring out how it ate and digested food. This preservation saved their work a lot of time and energy...
On Display
After spending long hours and several years researching this animal, the thing finally ended up back in the Royal Tyrrell Museum for display. It took almost six years and over 7,000 hours to get all the information they could use out of the precious fossilized organism. The Nodosaur sits in a glass cage for anyone who wants to see what they would have wanted for a pet 110 million years ago...
Continued Study
In early 2019, scientists were still studying the Nodosaur, trying to find out if they missed anything in those 6 years of study. Shawn and the team were ecstatic, and it was thought to be maybe the greatest archeological find of the decade, but they had no idea that there was still so much left in store. There's a lot of history lying just beneath the surface, and as one man can tell you, you never know what you're standing on...
The Heiltsuk
Once, upon a time, a different culture ruled over British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. The First Nation that was indigenous to the country was known as the Heiltsuk people. These pioneers laid claim to the remote island of Triquet for their people, harboring themselves there for nearly 5,000 years. Despite their frequent claims of ownership over the land, archeologists have ignored them for one important and historical reason...
Canadian Glacier
During the last Ice Age, a giant continental glacier changed history forever. The ice rock formed over the entirety of Canada, meaning it would have also covered Triquet Island. Living on the island during an Ice Age covering would have been impossible and completely uninhabitable. These facts negated the Heiltsuk claim, but a small group of scientists wanted to discover the truth once and for all...
Teaming Up
The scientists got to work, teaming up quickly with a group of equally intrigued archaeologists. Together, they began to excavate different parts of the remote island that they believed could contain traces of the mythical past civilization. Their efforts seemed unsuccessful at first, but after a little more digging, they soon discovered something that changed the course of history forever...
Hearth Earth
In their excavations, the team eventually found something they thought could be useful in deciding who owned the land. Laying just underneath the surface, they found bits and pieces of what seemed to be a foreign, ancient hearth that ran on burning wood. The team was totally baffled. The tribe would have had to dig beneath the surface to survive on the glacier through the Ice Age. What could this mean for them?
More Tools
As the search underground continued, the researchers found tools, artifacts, weaponry, daily items, and more odd objects just below the surface. This might have lent to the theory that this land was stolen, but these were all objects that the Heiltsuk people did not traditionally use. So if the Canadians weren't living here, and the Heiltsuk people weren't living here, then who inhabited this land all those years ago?
Heiltsuk Hunting
The Heiltsuk people originally sustained their livelihoods by hunting, fishing, and smoking salmon. The people also found it beneficial to use miniscule, precise tools to catch and prepare the food they hunted. However, the uncovered objects and weaponry found in the ground were pretty sizable. The archeologists guessed that these were used to hunt large sea animals, typically mammals. These might have included seals, sea lions, and walruses...
Uncovered Obsidian
Shards of obsidian, a glass-like rock, were also uncovered at the site. This was particularly strange because obsidian is only found in locations that have intense volcanic activity in the area. As you might have guessed, there are no volcanoes in British Columbia, or anywhere in Cananda for that matter. It seemed like an entire civilization was out of place. But then, they had to wonder, where did these people really come from?
Prehistoric Bridge
Back in prehistoric times, there was a land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. When the earth shifted it, the bridge broke and the two masses were disjointed. Historians figured that the indigenous people who first inhabited the land and left these artifacts must have traveled over that bridge at one point or another. It was a promising theory, but it wasn't enough to form their whole analysis around...
A Closer Look
After closely inspecting the hearth a little bit more, the archeologists were able to uncover ancient charcoal remains. This was a great find, as it could be used in carbon dating. They quickly brought it to the lab for testing. When they received the results, the entire team of researchers was gobbsmacked. Everything they thought they knew had been a total lie the entire time...
Old Charcoal
This wasn't just any old charcoal, this charcoal could be given an approximate date as to when the last people used it. When the carbon dating came back, it revealed that the civilization was likely an astounding 14,000 years old! This ancient rubble then became the oldest carbon remains to ever be found on the North American continent. What else could they find out about the glacier contents?
Global Standards
In terms of international impact, this discovery was still something to be marveled at. For context, it meant that they had found something that was older than both the Great Pyramid of Giza and the invention of the wheel!It was a truly remarkable discovery, but what was truly unprecedented was what it revealed about the Heiltsuk people and their claims over the land...
No Glacier
First of all, it negated the theory that the entire continent was once covered by a glacier. The 14,000-year-old carbon charcoal noted that the earliest Heiltsuk at Triquet Island was over 2,000 years before the end of the supposedly influential Ice Age. If they survived that, then it didn't cover as much land as the scientists once believed...
Boating In
Triquet Island, not surprisingly, was surrounded by water on all sides. Due to this, boats would have been required to get to the land, but there was one big problem. However, boats were not believed to have been invented until several hundreds of years after that. This meant that the Heiltsuk people were occupying in the land over 2,000 years prior to what the descendants initially believed.
Gradually Eroded
Despite the changes in the Pacific Ocean over time, the sea level at Triquet Island remained the exact same for over 15 centuries. The tides of the ocean and years of storms gradually eroded the islands surrounding the mainland, thus keeping away the giant prehistoric creatures that might prey on them. The Heiltsuk people were then free to have a calm, secluded existence for several years...
Media Response
The battle for their land continues to this day. Media outlets praised the people for bringing them to this scientific discvoery, but largely ignored what started this whole thing: their desire to get the land back. To this day, the Heiltsuk consider the treatment of their culture and their people during all of this to have been highly disrespectful. However, they continue to fight for the island, hoping to get it back in their name once again someday...