Man-Made or Natural? Mysterious, Giant Face Discovered on Cliff in Canada

A mysterious, “large” face on the cliffside of an island in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve has recently been re-discovered by a man who has been searching for the face for over two years, according to government agency Parks Canada.

Hank Gus of the Tseshaht First Nation, an aboriginal group in the area, first heard about the “face in the rocks” of Reeks Island, part of the Broken Group Islands, two years ago after hearing a story that a kayaking tourist spotted the face in 2008, said Parks Canada First Nation’s program manager Matthew Payne. He added that Gus was not able to find the reported face until just a few weeks ago.

“Gus and some Tseshaht beach keepers recently discovered it a few weeks ago, and they were very excited to share it with us and the archaeologist we work with,” Payne, 43, told ABC News. “We went out to see it recently, and it’s remarkable. It really is a face staring back at you.”

The face, believed to be about seven-feet-tall, is similar to a wooden carving on the door of the Tseshaht administration office, Payne said.

“The Tseshaht has lived in the area for thousands of years, so we working with the First Nations to find out if there are any oral histories the face could link back to,” Payne added.

Now, Tseshaht First Nation and Parks Canada are trying to figure out if the face was man-made or if it’s a natural marvel, he said.

“Mother Nature is capable of creating all sorts of amazing things, though the face is very striking,” Payne said. “But we still can’t definitively say if the face is man-made or not.”

Though the Tseshaht and Parks Canada would like to examine the face up-close, the cliff the face is on is treacherous, Payne said.

“The island has a rocky shoreline with lots of hidden rocks, and it can be dangerous depending on sea conditions,” he explained. “You need to know what you’re doing to go and look at it.”

The Tseshaht First Nation did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for additional information.

12-year-old boy finds 69 million-year-old dinosaur fossil during a hike with his dad

For as long as he can recall, Nathan Hrushkin had decided to be a palaeontologist, and the 12-year-old had already made a major discovery. When exploring with his dad this summer at a protected site in the Horseshoe Canyon in the Badlands of Alberta, Canada, he uncovered a partly uncovered dinosaur fossil.

It’s incredible to find something that’s real, like the real discovery of a fossil, like an actual dinosaur discovery,” “It’s kind of been my dream for a while.”

Nathan is a seventh-grader in Calgary, which is about an hour-and-a-half away. The fossil was a humerus bone from the arm of a juvenile hadrosaur — a duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 69 million years ago, according to a news release from the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Nathan and his dad, Dion, had found bone fragments in the area on a previous hike and thought that they might have washed down from farther up the hill.

They were just finishing lunch when Nathan climbed up the hill to take a look.

“He called down to me, he’s like, ‘Dad, you need to get up here,’ and as soon as he said that I could tell by the tone in his voice that he found something,” Dion Hrushkin said.

Nathan said the fossil was very obvious and it looked like “a scene on a TV show or a cartoon or something.”

They sent pictures of the bone to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, which identified the fossil and sent a team of palaeontologists to the site.

Fossils are protected by law in Alberta, and the NCC said that it is important that people don’t disturb any fossils they may find.
The crew has been working at the site for about two months and uncovered between 30 and 50 bones that came from a single young hadrosaur that was about three or four years old, according to the statement.

Hadrosaur bones are the most common fossils found in Alberta’s badlands, but few juvenile skeletons have been found, the statement said. It was also found in a layer of rock that rarely preserves fossils.

“This young hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta,” François Therrien, the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s curator of dinosaur palaeoecology, said in the statement. “Nathan and Dion’s find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution.”

The fossils were very close together, so the palaeontologists removed large pieces of the surrounding rock from the canyon walls.

The bones were then covered in a protective jacket of burlap and plaster, so they could be taken to the museum for cleanup and further study.

One of the fossil-rich slabs weighed about 1,000 pounds and was more than four feet wide, according to Carys Richards, a communications manager with the NCC.

Nathan had heard of the hadrosaur before his big find but said it wasn’t the most well-known dinosaur. It’s probably his favourite now — beating out the wildly popular Tyrannosaurus rex.

Nathan and his dad have come to watch the dig several times since the discovery and were there on Thursday when the team was hauling out the last specimens.

“It was pretty fun to be there and watch them do their things,” Nathan said.

57,000-Year-Old Wolf Pup Mummy Uncovered in Canadian Permafrost

In Yukon, Canada, a perfectly preserved wolf puppy, hidden away for 57,000 years in permafrost and identified by researchers as “the oldest, most complete wolf,” has been discovered in Yukon, Canada.

At the Klondike goldfields, near Dawson City, a miner had seen something in the frozen mud wall, and he had to blast through it to get to it to see what it was. He found a creature that was named the Zhùr by the local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation people.

Julie Meachen, an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines University in Iowa, told CNN, “This mummy is so complete, she has basically got all her skin, most of her fur … all her soft tissues present, and she’s 56,000 years old.

The female pup, according to Meachen, is “the oldest, most complete wolf that’s ever been found,” allowing researchers to delve deeper into what her life would have looked like.

Using X-ray techniques, experts determined that the puppy, which had been preserved in permafrost, died at 6 or 7 weeks old.

Meanwhile, a technique called stable isotope analysis revealed that the animal lived during a time when glaciers had receded.

“There weren’t quite as many glaciers around, which means there was a lot more freshwater,” she said. “There were a lot of streams, a lot of rivers flowing, and probably a lot of other animals around. She lived in a lush time.”

The wolf cub’s diet, researchers found, was influenced by her proximity to water: Isotope analysis revealed “she and her mom were eating mostly aquatic resources — things like salmon, maybe some shorebirds,” Meachen said.

DNA analysis revealed the pup is descended from ancient wolves — the ancestors of modern wolves — from Russia, Siberia and Alaska.

“It’s not a surprise — she is related to the things that were there at the time,” she explained. “But the cool thing about that, that most people might not know, is that wolves in the ice age were only distantly related to wolves that are around today.

“They are still the same species, but they are very different, for being in the same species. Their genetics have changed quite a bit over time — the diversity of wolf has been diminished over time, and again, expanded.

“She is truly an ancient wolf, and she was related to all the wolves around her at the time,” Meachen said.

It takes very specific circumstances to create a permafrost mummy, the researchers said, although several well-preserved wolf cubs have been retrieved from Siberia. However, this cub, found in North America, was particularly rare.”It’s rare to find these mummies in the Yukon.

The animal has to die in a permafrost location, where the ground is frozen all the time, and they have to get buried very quickly, like any other fossilization process,” Meachen said in a statement. “If it lays out on the frozen tundra too long it’ll decompose or get eaten.”

Because of her “pristine” condition, experts think that the wolf cub died instantaneously, perhaps when her den collapsed, as data showed she didn’t starve.

Massive dinosaur fossil unearthed by Alberta pipeline crew

A new large tyrannosaur from Alberta, a predatory dinosaur whose name means “reaper of death,” was found by palaeontologists from the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

The 79-million-year-old fossil, named Thanatotheristes, is the oldest tyrannosaur reported from northern North America and the first new tyrannosaur species found in Canada in 50 years, according to the research team’s report.

“It’s the oldest example of a large tyrannosaur in Canada found in an older window of time than in previous tyrannosaurs,” says Dr Darla Zelenitsky, a co-author of the study, PhD, Principal Dinosaur Researcher of the University of Calgary and Assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience.

Study lead author Jared Voris, shown above, a PhD student of Zelenitsky’s whose analysis identified the new species, says the fossil specimen is very important to understanding the Late Cretaceous period when tyrannosaurs roamed the Earth.  It gives us a new understanding of tyrannosaur evolution and how these animals interacted with their ecosystem.

“With this new species, we now know that tyrannosaurs were present in Alberta prior to 77 million years ago, the age of the next-oldest tyrannosaur,” says study co-author Dr. François Therrien, PhD, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. “We can tell from the skull how Thanatotheristes is related to the other, better-known tyrannosaurs from Alberta.”

The research team also included Dr.Caleb Brown, PhD, curator of dinosaur systematics and evolution at the Royal Tyrrell and a co-author of the study.

The team’s study, “A New Tyrannosaurine (Theropoda: Tyrannosauridae) from the Campanian Foremost Formation of Alberta, Canada, Provides Insight into the Evolution and Biogeography of Tyrannosaurids,” is published in the peer-reviewed journal Cretaceous Research.

New species have distinct physical features

Thanatotheristes degrootorum, a new genus and species, was identified from a fragmentary fossil consisting of parts of the skull and the upper and lower jawbones. The bones, which had apparently tumbled from a cliff and shattered on the shore of the Bow River, were found by John and Sandra De Groot (after whom the new species was named) in 2010 near the town of Hays, about 200 kilometres southeast of Calgary.

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The specimen lay in a drawer at the Royal Tyrrell Museum until last spring, when Voris examined it. “We found features of the skull that had not been seen before in other tyrannosaurs,” he says. “The fossil has several physical features, including ridges along the upper jaw, which clearly distinguishes it as being from a new species.”

The diagnostic evidence showed that Thanatotheristes is a close relative of two other well-known tyrannosaur species, Daspletosaurus torosus and Daspletosaurus horneri. All three species form a newly named group of dinosaurs called Daspletosaurini.

This group had longer, deeper snouts and more teeth in the upper jaws than tyrannosaurs found in the southern U.S., which had shorter, bulldog-like faces, Voris says.

Research indicates diversity among tyrannosaurs

Thanatotheristes, which Voris estimates were approximately eight metres long, likely preyed on large plant-eating dinosaurs, such as the horned Xenoceratops and the dome-headed Colepiochephale that were part of the ecosystem.

The differences in size, skull shape and other physical features among tyrannosaur groups from various geographical regions may be adaptations to different environments, available prey type and hunting strategies, Zelenitsky says.

“Some species are better suited to certain environments,” Voris says. “This reduces competition and gives species a better chance of survival.”

Such “provinciality” can also be seen in modern ecosystems with lions and tigers, he adds. Lions are found in Africa and favour open, savanna-type environments, while tigers are found in Asia and prefer forested environments.

Royal Tyrrell Museum

The team’s research also suggests tyrannosaurs didn’t share one general body type. Instead, groups of different tyrannosaur species evolved distinct skull forms, body sizes and other physical features, spreading into different environments where each group thrived.

“The next step is to test that hypothesis further and compare how tyrannosaur species from various geological regions differed,” Voris says.

The team’s research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, an Eyes High Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship for Voris, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum Cooperating Society.

Discovery of 1,000-year-old Viking site in Canada could rewrite history

The possible discovery of a 1,000-year-old Viking site on a Canadian island could rewrite the story of the exploration of North America by Europeans before Christopher Columbus.

The uncovering of stone used in ironworking on Newfoundland, hundreds of miles south from the only known Viking site in North America, suggests the Vikings may have travelled much further into the continent than previously thought. 

A group of archaeologists has been excavating the newly found site at the Point Rosee, a narrow, windswept peninsula on the most western point of the island.  

To date, the only confirmed Viking site on the American continent is L’Anse aux Meadows, a 1,000-year-old way station found in 1960 on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

That settlement was abandoned after just a few years of being inhabited and archaeologists have spent the last fifty years searching for any other signs of Viking expeditions to the other side of the Atlantic. 

American archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who has utilized satellite imagery to locate lost Egyptian cities, temples and tombs, applied the similar technology to explore the island, seeking for traces of lost Viking settlements. 

She was drawn to this remote part of Canada after satellite imagery uncovered ground features that appeared to indicate human activity.

Ms Parcak looked at modern-day plant cover to discover places where a possible Viking settlement had altered the soil by changing the amount of moisture in the ground. This was the method she had previously used in Egypt. 

After identifying a potential site, archaeologists discovered a hearth-stone, which was used for iron-working, near what appeared to have been a turf wall. 

“The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonisation attempt,” Douglas Bolender, an excavator specialising in Norse settlements, told National Geographic magazine.

“L’Anse aux Meadows fits well with that story however is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it if the dating is different from L’Anse aux Meadows.

We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World.

“A site like Point Rosee has the potential to reveal what that initial wave of Norse colonization looked like, not only for New foundland but for the rest of the North Atlantic.” 

But there is not enough evidence for archaeologists to prove the Vikings settled on the site, as other populations also lived on Newfoundland after them. 

If the site is confirmed as a legitimate Viking settlement, this could lead to further search for other settlements, built 5 centuries before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. 

Man Discovers Mysterious ‘Face’ On Canada Cliffside After 2-Year Search

According to Parks Canada, a man from whom he has searched for the face for over two years recently rediscovered a mysterious large face on the cliff of one Island inside the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.

Hank Gus from the First Nation of Tseshaht, an Aboriginal tribe in the area, learnt about the face of the rocks in Reeks Island, part of Broken Group Islands for the first time.

2 years ago, when someone told him a kayaking tourist spotted the face in 2008, said Parks Canada First Nations program manager Matthew Payne. He added that Gus was not able to find the face until just a few weeks ago.

“Gus and some Tseshaht beach keepers recently discovered it a few weeks ago, and they were very excited to share it with us and the archaeologist we work with,” Payne told ABC News today. “We went out to see it recently, and it’s remarkable. It really is a face staring back at you.”

The face, believed to be about 7 feet tall, is similar to a wooden carving on the door of the Tseshaht administration office, Payne said.

“The Tseshaht has lived in the area for thousands of years, so we’re working with the First Nations to find out if there are any oral histories the face could link back to,” he added.

Now the Tseshaht First Nation and Parks Canada are trying to figure out if the face is a man-made or natural marvel, he said.

“Mother Nature is capable of creating all sorts of amazing things, though the face is very striking,” Payne said. “But we still can’t definitively say if the face is man made or not.”

Though the Tseshaht and Parks Canada would like to examine the face up close, the face’s cliff is treacherous, he said.

“The island has a rocky shoreline with lots of hidden rocks, and it can be dangerous, depending on sea conditions,” he said. “You need to know what you’re doing to go and look at it.”

The Tseshaht First Nation did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for additional information.

Iroquoian Woodland Village Site Discovered in Ontario

Excavation of an Iroquoian village site in southeastern Canada ahead of a road construction project has yielded more than 35,000 artefacts, according to a Kitchener Today report.

Representatives of the Six Nations of the Grand Reserve, the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation have been working with archaeologists throughout the process. Archaeologist Barbara Slim said the village has been dated to between A.D. 1300 and 1600. 

The village site has yielded over 35,000 to date in the 400 square units that have been excavated. Those one-by-one metre squares of hand sifted soil have included evidence of permanent settlement, ceramics used for cooking and food preparation, stone tools and more.

Associate Archeologist with Wood PLC Barbara Slim said that the company is working closely with the Region of Waterloo as part of the Fischer-Hallman road redevelopment. She said the site was initially uncovered in 2017 in the western end of the property, eventually found to extend to the East through construction monitoring.

“Usually in archaeology when you have a roadway you assume that… that extent of disturbance would completely have removed the site…” said Slim. “… in this case, it did the opposite; it capped it under one-point-eight metres of fill with four layers of asphalt – so we’re in the process of excavating that.”

According to their findings, Slim said the site being excavated is a late woodland village, dated to be from around 1300 to 1600. The investigation has found a permanent settlement with several longhouses, as well as a broad range of artefacts and bone material.

Some of the more interesting items from the excavation include carbonized evidence of bean and corn – a unique find dated to that time period. Also uncovered was a chalcedony projectile point, made from a material not found in Southern Ontario.

“… we know there were a number of different villages within the area – at least four or five that we know of. It is quite important to understand that time period in Ontario archaeology, and to get a better sense of how long we’ve been here,” said Slim. “I should mention we also found an artefact that dates to 4,000 years ago – that just goes to show this was a very important resource area where people were coming back (…) to utilize the resources available.”

Slim said an important part of the work of archaeologists is to work with local indigenous communities to do the work alongside them. The project is accompanied by several Indigenous field liaison representatives – including those from Six Nations of the Grand Reserve, Haudenosaunee Development Institute and Mississaugas of the Credit.

Matthew Muttart is the field director with Wood PLC and has experience working closely with these groups in the excavation process. He said that First Nations groups have brought traditional and cultural perspective to the artefacts being unearthed.

“I’m very fortunate to have them with me in the field because we look at the site and how to proceed together. We discuss our methodology and how we’re going to proceed – and that’s very useful for me,” said Muttart.

Due to the volume of artefacts found, the archaeological work is set to continue for the rest of this construction season, with additional work needing to be completed next year.

It’s expected that excavation costs will be higher than originally estimated, with additional costs for completing road construction work that will now need to be completed later. Excavation staff will be providing an updated report to Regional Council in the new year.

Slim said she’s optimistic that Fischer-Hallman Road will be reopened as planned by the end of 2020 with a 2-lane temporary road cross-section.

In the offseason, Muttart said artefacts will be cleaned, catalogued and analysed to see if they can find any patterns or answer any questions to get a better understanding of the inhabitants of the site.

“We try to engage with the general public with the First Nations groups and try to have the artefacts tell a story, educate people and give a perspective…” said Muttart. “We’re in this part of the world that have been occupied for at least 10,000 years; it has a very rich history and a history that Canadians don’t get a lot of opportunities to learn about…”

“We’re writing the last chapter of this site… so it’s really important that we’re doing it meticulously, giving it the respect and care that the site deserves – as archaeologists, we’re stewards to that’s our charge.”

Archaeologists on site are operating with a modified protocol due to COVID-19 – with teams of three now working separately with masks in order to ensure safe physical distancing. Slim said the important measure has slowed the operation down, but not enough to make a significant dent in the team’s schedule. Local students were also originally set to join the dig team – that measure has been postponed to the Spring should the COVID-19 pandemic be more under control.

“Every day here has been really exciting – every component of the site has evolved in a very unique way. It’s been a very challenging project from the beginning, but very interesting to work with the communities, to work with this great team we have here to unearth what’s preserved…”