Paleontologist Anne Pasch digs for
fossils inside a permafrost tunnel
Photo: Kevin May
Using a technique never attempted before in North America, a team of mud-scoured paleontologists sifted frozen ground inside a mine tunnel in the ancient permafrost of an Arctic riverbank — and uncovered a trove of 100 buried dinosaur fossils at least 70 million years old.
The project, coordinated by the University of Alaska Museum of the North, punched the shaft into an extraordinary fossil bed that emerges from the cliffs along the Colville River, the major river that drains the Brooks Range into the Arctic Ocean.
Over the years, scientists have visited these grounds to conduct precarious digs perched on narrow benches and collapsing banks, excavating bit by bit through sloughing scree and muck.
Despite such difficulties, more than 8,000 bits of bone and teeth have been recovered from a dozen extinct families, offering stunning insight into the variety of polar dinosaurs that once thrived in the Far North.
But the scientists always thought there had to be a better way than wading through muck for weathered and broken remnants . This summer, using a technique first developed by paleontologist Thomas Rich in Australia, a shaft was dug.
In August, mining of the Colville’s dinosaur bank begun.
And they found dinosaurs fossils deep within.