1994: The "Scotty" Tyranosaurus Dig

  The next day we drove the 12 kms to Eastend, Saskatchewan.   After checking out the camping possibilities at the regional park, we drove out to White Mud Pits to do some fossil hunting.  We spent the morning searching high and low, climbing up the slopes and down, without much success.  I did find a fragment of turtle shell.

Back in Eastend, a charming small town prairie town of around 600 people, we visited their  surprisingly interesting small museum, then set up our tent back at the Regional park.  After lunch we waited around for 2:30, when we would begin our T-Rex Tour.  The tour cost us $20 each.

The site of the Tyrannosaurus skeleton was located on rather barren-looking looking ranch land, and we watched the small group of paleontologists busily digging at the upper edge of a coulee.  The initial discovery of the T-Rex bones happened in 1991, by the local school principal who happened to be  with a group of paleontologists to learn about how to find and identify fossils.  Luckily, he was the one that found a Tyrannosaurus tooth, which then led to the rest of the fossilized skeleton of “Scotty”.

When it was determined to be a fairly complete skeleton; a very rare find, the excavation began in earnest in 1994, just months before we arrived.  The paleontologists expected to have the whole T-Rex skeleton removed by mid-September, a month after our visit, but it was slow going, having to remove the fossils which were embedded in rock, painstakingly, by hand.  It would take twenty years for all the bones to be removed, cleaned, and then re-assembled into a standing display.

They named the Tyrannosaurus “Scotty”, after the bottle of scotch they imbibed to celebrate its discovery.  Scotty is still a famous T-Rex.  It is the largest Tyrannosaurus ever discovered, and in 2025, paleontologists made another discovery from its bones.  They found blood vessels in one of its ribs that had been broken before its death.  The blood vessels were there to help the rib heal.  It was the first discovery of the blood vessels in a dinosaur.  Soft tissue is rarely fossilized. 

        The little town of Eastend, Saskatchewan has used the discovery of Scotty as the main centerpiece in the construction of a museum called the T.rex Discovery Centre, which opened in 2003.