So why visit Eastend, Saskatchewan, pop. 607? First, it was a convenient stop on our way to Montana, second it’s very close to the site of the largest complete T-Rex dinosaur excavated-to-date. Both were important reasons to visit!

Back when planning this trip, we identified the T-Rex Discovery Centre, a Royal Saskatchewan Museum, as a place of interest. How could we pass up the opportunity to see where Scotty was discovered in Frenchman River Valley near Eastend? 

Scotty was discovered by Robert Gebhardt, a high school principal from Eastend, Saskatchewan. He found a tooth and a vertebra which led to the discovery of the T-Rex fossil.

The T-Rex Discovery Centre is built into the side of a hill to minimize the profile of the building. Its low profile and color allow the building to blend into the landscape, rather than dominate it. From the front it has an expansive view of the countryside and town of Eastend.

The T-Rex Discovery Center is a gorgeous building with numerous informative displays covering topics including archeology, paleontology, flora and fauna, and indigenous cultural heritage. It has an active research area that one can walk through.

Of most interest to us was being able to walk through the research facility and talking with the staff. Neither of us had heard of field jacket processing (shown below). Field jacketing is the process of encasing fossils in burlap and plaster to permit intact removal and transport to a laboratory for further research. The largest jacket removed from the Scotty Quarry weighted six tons! We got to see several actual jackets currently being processed by the Centre’s paleontologists.

One of the “jackets” being worked on in the research area was the fossil of a triceratops collected in 1994. There is a large backlog of Jackets waiting to be opened and worked on. It takes much less time to jacket and remove smaller fossil finds than it takes to properly conserve them.

We were disappointed to learn that Scotty’s fossils are not on site but at a research center in Regina. As you can imagine, the Scotty fossil is too fragile and unique to be put on display so the Museum uses life-sized replicas for display purposes. This replica is in a slightly different pose than the replica in the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. This one does not roar!

We will visit the Eastend Historical Museum in our next post.