A high school teacher, a single bone, and a bottle of scotch on a Saturday afternoon in southwest Saskatchewan. One of the greatest palaeontological discoveries in Canadian history.
On August 16, 1991, a high school teacher named Robert Gebhardt from Eastend joined Royal Saskatchewan Museum palaeontologists on a prospecting expedition along the exposed bedrock of the Frenchman River Valley. Within half a day, he discovered the base of a heavily worn tooth and a vertebra from a tail. Both suggested they belonged to a Tyrannosaurus rex.
They named him Scotty — after the bottle of scotch the field crew opened that night to celebrate.
The dig went on for years. When researchers finally weighed the fully excavated skeleton, Scotty turned out to be the largest T. rex ever found — heavier and longer than any other specimen on record. He had walked these hills sixty-six million years ago, just before the asteroid that ended the age of dinosaurs.
In 2023, Scotty was named Saskatchewan’s Official Fossil.
