In late autumn 1988, Richard Hebda \u2014 then head of botany at the Royal BC Museum \u2014 stepped into the living room of a man named Mike Trask following a report of an interesting fossil find on the Puntledge River.<\/p>\n
According to Hebda, when he shook hands with the amateur fossil hunter, he was not expecting much. Before this, the paleobotanist had a call about dinosaur ribs in a dry creek bed near Chemainus that turned out to be dirtbike tracks.<\/p>\n
But this stop at the Courtenay resident\u2019s home would be different.<\/p>\n
Trask\u2019s Comox Valley-based discovery would forever change paleontology in B.C. and would inspire a flood of amateur paleontologists, many of whom would go on to make hundreds of new discoveries in the field. His findings would even inspire the first paleontological society in the province, with more than 100 members on Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt opened a door, not only into a room, but into another gigantic world,\u201d Hebda said in a 2026 interview with The Discourse.<\/p>\n
While in Trask\u2019s living room, Hebda said he carefully looked over a string of grey tubular rocks that Trask had placed on newspapers in front of his glowing fireplace.<\/p>\n
He confirmed Trask\u2019s suspicions \u2014 these were fossil vertebrae from a large animal of some kind or another.<\/p>\n
Hebda said Trask explained how he\u2019d found the vertebrae when fossil hunting with his 13-year-old daughter, Heather, on the Puntledge River.<\/p>\n
At that time, Hebda said, he was aware of no significant vertebrates \u2014 animals with backbones and an internal skeleton \u2014 being found on Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n
Before leaving, Hebda took some fossil bones to pass along to Betsy Nicholls, a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrell Museum and expert on marine reptiles.According to a 1998 interview with Trask in Issue 20 of the British Columbia Paleontological Alliance Newsletter, Nicholls recognized them immediately as belonging to an elasmosaur.<\/p>\n
This marine reptile swam in the oceans of the late Cretaceous period, around 85-million years ago, and resembled the Loch Ness monster, with a small head and a neck as long as its bulbous body.<\/p>\n
The specimen was the first of its kind found west of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.<\/p>\n
Trask figured a paleontologist would describe this creature eventually, according to the 1998 interview with him. To accurately study the fossil, they would need all the existing bones, and he said \u201cit wouldn\u2019t be fair to have more of the specimen appear afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the help of an invertebrate paleontologist, Rolf Ludvigson, who\u2019d recently moved to Denman Island from Toronto, the two of them made a plan.<\/p>\n
Two years later, in 1991, the Courtenay and District Museum placed an advertisement in the newspaper that read: \u201cLooking for 20 volunteers for paleontological excavation.\u201d Ludvigson oversaw the excavation project, while Trask managed the technical notes and site plans.<\/p>\n
On the first day of the dig in March, the relentless rain bounced off the shale riverbed, threatening to turn to snow at just above zero degrees. Despite the weather, more than 50 volunteers showed up.<\/p>\n
Every weekend over a three-month period, the team excavated and shoveled about 100 cubic metres of earth, the equivalent of filling three 20-foot shipping containers, from the site along the Puntledge River.<\/p>\n
Underneath all this dirt and shale rock they found the rest of the specimen, which was nearly complete.<\/p>\n
Because of the strong interest from volunteers, Trask began teaching a course on local paleontology and geology at North Island College.<\/p>\n
While his professional background was not in paleontology, he\u2019d been collecting since he was a kid in Rock Glen, Ont. and had a strong grasp in geology as an engineering surveyor for the Ministry of Highways, Trask explained in a 2023 conversation with Discourse freelance reporter Dave Flawse.<\/p>\n
In 1991, Trask led his students on their first fossil field trip to the Puntledge River. One of the participants, a radiologist named Joe Zanbilowicz, found a small vertebra embedded in the shale cliff, then another.<\/p>\n
Soon they found more bones that seemed to be yet another marine reptile. On a second field trip, the group found more vertebrae and numerous other fossils.<\/p>\n
Given the finds, \u201cthe class just didn\u2019t want to quit,\u201d Trask said. The group of 30 to 50 Comox Valley residents began meeting informally, outside of class.<\/p>\n
After three months, they decided to formalize these meetings and created the Vancouver Island Paleontological Society in 1992 and became the first paleontological society in the province.<\/p>\n
Soon, the group grew to 80 local members, plus another 80 who lived outside the Comox Valley.<\/p>\n
To better service those elsewhere, the society\u2019s board decided to encourage a regional approach, and similar societies sprung up in Victoria, Vancouver and Qualicum Beach.<\/p>\n
But how would the now separate groups share information and news about discoveries?<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s when the British Columbia Paleontological Alliance was formed,\u201d said Dan Bowen in an interview with The Discourse. Bowen is a founding member, former chair and current vice chair of the alliance.<\/p>\n
The British Columbia Paleontological Alliance became an umbrella organization, Bowen explained, that brought together professional paleontologists at the Royal BC Museum and Jim Haggart, a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, with amateur collectors (citizen scientists) to collaborate in the best interest of paleontology.<\/p>\n
One of the first initiatives the newly formed alliance undertook was the development of policy and regulations on fossil collecting, including a code of ethics.<\/p>\n
One important policy drafted was to stop the commercial sale of B.C. fossils.<\/p>\n
In the past, commercial fossil collectors operated in B.C. in the Tumbler Ridge area, \u201ctaking out large slabs of fossil fish,\u201d Bowen said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe value of these fossils was to such a degree that they could afford a helicopter to remove them.\u201d<\/p>\n
At that time in B.C., commercial collectors could legally remove and sell fossils from the province.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s something Trask could have done with the elasmosaur. But he understood the importance of science, which was fostered in him from a young age.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no science club,\u201d Trask explained in 2023. \u201cSo my geography and biology teachers both took me under their wings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trask knew that when fossils leave the province illegally, paleontologists can no longer study them and determine their significance to science.<\/p>\n
In the early 2000s, the British Columbia Paleontological Alliance began discussions with the province to implement a provincial fossil management framework, according to Bowen.<\/p>\n
Over a 20-year period, the alliance worked to improve management of fossils in the province.<\/p>\n
In 2022, the province adopted fossil management<\/a> policies that, among other things, prohibited the removal and sale of fossils from B.C.<\/p>\n Fossil collectors can keep their finds, \u201cas caretakers, not owners, of the fossil,\u201d according to the B.C. fossil management website.<\/p>\n The alliance\u2019s efforts have transformed B.C. from a paleontological backwater into a place where paleontologists cannot keep up with the number of new discoveries to science.<\/p>\n Over the years since Mike Trask\u2019s discovery of the elasmosaur, fossil collectors have found new genera and species to science across the province, numbering in the hundreds.<\/p>\n This includes the marine reptile found by Zanbilowicz on that first field trip. Betsy Nicholls, the same paleontologist who helped describe the elasmosaur specimen with Trask, described the reptile as a mosasaur, named Kourisodon puntledgensis.<\/p>\n The mosasaur was a new genus and species and the name means \u201crazor tooth from the Puntledge River.\u201d It is like no other mosasaur found on the planet with its unique razor-blade-like teeth.<\/p>\n A number of Comox Valley fossil hunters have fossil taxa named for them as the discoverers. Following Bowen\u2019s discovery of a crab, the species Cretalamoha boweni was named in his honour.<\/p>\n In 2023, through a decades-long initiative by the British Columbia Paleontological Alliance, the province adopted Trask\u2019s elasmosaur as the provincial fossil<\/a>, alongside six other symbols, including the Pacific dogwood and spirit bear.<\/p>\n