Regina Leader-Post
July 20, 1963. p.3
A discovery of considerable paleontological importance has resulted in a new relic of prehistoric life taking its place in the provincial museum.
The remains of a plesiosaur, a marine reptile of the Cretaceous period, were discovered recently in a field about 35 miles southwest of Regina.
The Cretaceous period was roughly 130,000,000 years ago.
Herbert Hlady, a Churchbridge schoolteacher, discovered the skeleton. Leaving it untouched, he notified museum officials.
A team of two made the collection - Bruce McCorquodale, the museum's curator of paleontology, and his assistant, Albert Swanston.
Mr. McCorquodale commeded the original discoverer of the find for leaving the skeleton untouched until professional workers could attend to it.
The museum team followed an established pattern in preparing the skeleton to return it to the museum. The bones were left as they had been found and the ground beneath them was undermined.
The skeleton was divided into easily transported parts and covered with paper towelling and plaster-soaked strips of burlap to hold the pieces together for later study at the museum.
A plesiosaur was a large reptile which is believed to have lived entirely in the water. It had no legs, only four paddle fins, used for propelling it through the water.
The plesiosaur whose remains were discovered was a long-necked variety. The neck is thought to measure about 20 feet in length while the body is little more than 10 feet long.
The animal could not live submerged in the water and is thought to have remained on the surface shooting its long neck into the deep after fish, its staple diet.
The museum's plesiosaur is not complete. The major portions of the upper part of the body, the long neck and the jaw bone have been found but the skull and portions of the lower body and the short tail are missing.
The skeleton is complete enough to represent a rare discovery of plesiosaur remains.
It also represents the first discovery of a plesiosaur so near Regina.
Remains of plesiosaurs and other similar reptiles are part of the evidence left today of a huge, shallow sea which once stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.
Plesiosaurs and several other species of large carnivorous reptiles were contemporaries of the large and extensive family of dinosaurs which lived on land.
Both the land and water reptiles disappeared after the Cretaceous age.
Due to the pressures of other work and the extreme patience required for the job, the museum staff may not have their latest find prepared for display for one or two years.
