Dinosaur fossils found in Edmonton tunnel

Aaron Krywiak was scratching atdirt in a sewer tunnel nearly 30 metres below asuburban Edmonton neighbourhood on Thursday when his hands ran over something unusual.

"I noticed an interesting-shaped rock,"Krywiak, a City of Edmonton employee,said in an interview Monday.

Krywiak passedthe object toco-worker Ryley Paul, who was pretty sure it was a dinosaur tooth.

"I was pretty giddy because I loved dinosaurs as a kid." Paul said. "So just being able to hold the bone was pretty intense."

After Krywiak and Paul showed their foreman their discovery,police were called to rule out the possibilitythey'd unearthed human remains.

In fact,the young men had found what turned into a motherlode of dinosaur bones parts of a large limb bone from a dinosaur known as Edmontosaurus, and the tooth of a tyrannosaurid, which was likely from an Albertosaurus.

"I'm thrilled,"Krywiaksaid."I never thought I'd ever get a chance to do something like this, so it's something newfor me. It's really, really exciting. I'm just enjoying every minute of it."

The Royal Tyrrell Museum, known for its expertise in paleontology,said the find in the Quesnell Heightsneighbourhood was significant.

"The discovery is significant for its location," said Don Brinkman, the museum's director of preservation and research."The animals are well-known but what this does is put those animals in a particular association in a particular place."

After police looked at Krywiak and Paul's find,the citycalledJack Brink, curator of archaeology at the Royal Alberta Museum, who then contacted Mike Burns, a PhD student in paleontology at the University of Alberta, toconfirm the objects were fossils.

They unearthed more bones from the site.

Brinkman commended the city workers for leading researchers to this find.

"Kudos to the people doing the excavation that they recognized that this was something unusual," he said.

The bones will be dug up over the next couple of days and taken to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., for examination.