A century old mystery at Dinosaur Provincial Park near Brooks, Alta. has finally been solved.
A headless dinosaur skeleton — a big tourist attraction at the park — has finally been reunited with its head.
On Wednesday, the University of Alberta announced researchers matched the headless skeleton to a Corythosaurus skull from the university’s Paleontology Museum that had been collected in 1920 by George Sternberg.
“In the early days of dinosaur hunting and exploration, explorers only took impressive and exciting specimens for their collections, such as skulls, tail spines and claws,” graduate student Katherine Bramble explained. “Now, it’s common for paleontologists to come across specimens in the field without their skulls.”
The headless Corythosaurus skeleton has been on display in Dinosaur Provincial Park since the 1990s. In the early 2010s, a group of scientists noticed newspaper clippings dating back to the 1920s in the debris around the site.
The U of A said Darren Tanke, a technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, began to wonder if the skeleton could be related to the skull at the university.
“Using anatomical measurements of the skull and the skeleton, we conducted a statistical analysis,” Bramble explained. “Based on these results, we believed there was potential that the skull and this specimen belonged together.”
In 2012, the skull and skeleton of the Corythosaurus were reunited.
The researchers findings were published this month.
The specimen resides at the University of Alberta.
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