Overview
- The team led by Dr. David Evans published a peer-reviewed description of the fossil in FACETS on April 17, 2026 and formally identified the specimen as a dinosaur tail vertebra.
- The bone was collected in 1999 from marine rocks of the Cedar District Formation on Denman Island and dates to the Campanian age, about 80–75 million years ago.
- Researchers used CT scans to make a 3D model and compared it with tail vertebrae in museum collections, concluding the bone most closely matches an ornithomimosaur and is likely the 10th caudal vertebra.
- This specimen is only the second reported dinosaur skeletal occurrence from the Nanaimo Group and the first from Canadian outcrops, and authors list transport scenarios such as shoreline washout, wave or current action, scavenging, or a floating carcass.
- The find gives the clearest direct evidence so far that ornithomimosaurs lived along North America’s ancient Pacific margin but a single isolated bone cannot resolve local diversity or species links and the team calls for more fossils to answer those questions.