Well the part where Heather and her dad were walking had a rocky shoreline. The rocks were shale...that is a flatish smooth kind of rock that is made from mud that has been pressed down for many years. Mr. Trask, (that was Heather's dad's name) was walking ahead and Heather was dawdling behind a bit. She was looking at the rocks carefully because she and her dad were hoping to find some fossils. Sometimes the bodies of little animals or plants fall into mud and when that mud turns to stone you can still see their shape. These are called fossils. Well this day, Heather found more than she was looking for! She noticed some strange bumps sticking up from the smooth rock on the shore. They were about the size and shape of a big coffee can but they were made from rock. She called her dad to come and take a look.

 Mr. Trask was very interested in fossils and knew a lot about them. He thought that these lumps might be the bones of some kind of animal that had lived in ancient times. Sometimes if things are just right, bones will get turned into stone. That only happens after many many years. Mr. Trask thought these rocks were so interesting he decided to come back the next day and try to chip away some of the flat rock so he could see these strange ones better. When he had done that, he had a special scientist who studies fossils look at them. The scientist said they were the backbone of a huge sea animal called the elasmosaur. The elasmosaur lived 80 million years ago. People had found bones from these sea monsters before but never in western Canada. I think the elasmosaur looks like a dinosaur but my mum says he isn't really. He is even OLDER than the dinosaurs!

It took six years for Mr. Trask and a lot of his friends to chip away the rock from around all of these stone bones. Rolf Ludvigsen, a scientist who studied old bone like this, told them how to do it. When they had all the old bones pried loose, they sent them to a special place in Alberta. There they have people who know how to put these bones together so that they show the shape the animal would have been when it was alive. I bet you are dying to see it so I will show you a picture. These are paintings of the elasmosaur that were done on a mural for the Courtenay Museum. The real bones are in cases that go all around the room because that is how much room it takes to line them all up. Our elasmosaur is 50 feet long and probably weighed between four and five tons….that is as much as about three cars. He had a long neck that he swished back and forth in the water. He had pointy teeth and ate fish. The body of the elasmosaur is like a big turtle's without a shell. He had four paddles for legs and they were very powerful and would move his body through the water very quickly.

Our elasmosaur is quite similar to a plesiosaur found in California but it is much bigger. Its head is bigger and so are its bones. It is about the biggest elasmosaur we know about. The scientists think maybe our elasmosaur is bigger and stronger because it was living in the wild waters of the Pacific Ocean. The other strange sea animals like this have been found in calmer inland seas.

Some people think there is not much excitement in a little town like ours. I bet not many people in the big city have their very own kind of dinosaur. We are sort of famous. If you look the elasmosaur up on the Internet it is always the one from Courtenay they tell you about. You could come and see the bones yourself if you wanted to. They are all lined up in a row in our little museum.

The pictures of our elasmosaur were scanned from post cards that in turn were produced from photos of a mural done by Dan Bowen and Rob Lundquist. The purchase of the post cards supports the development of the Courtenay fossil exhibition.