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Ancient walrus heads to new home

Prehistoric walrus skeleton will no longer grace the Qualicum Beach Museum.
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Museum volunteers work to prepare Rosie for her final trip back east.

When Rosie finally gave up her struggles and settled quietly into the mud, she couldn’t know her descendents would continue on the grand journey to the place were their ancestors began.

Her brain wasn’t set up for long-range thinking like that — and she certainly wasn’t capable of conceiving that now, 70,000 years after her death, she would take a large part of that journey too — but this time by a shorter route, and on pavement.

The ancient walrus, a signature piece of the paleontology collection at the Qualicum Beach Museum, began the trip Friday, as volunteers packed up her skeleton, put her head in a box and shipped her to the Museum of Natural History in Ottawa.

“Apparently, they are making a new Ice Age display, which is why they wanted it,” said local paleontologist Graham Beard. “She’s been here 11 years.”

The fossilized remains, Beard said, were found on a beach just north of Dashwood by the late Bill Waterhouse.

“He was going to collect oysters and saw the tusks sticking out of the clay,” Beard said. “That part of the beach is still rebounding after the melting of the ice, so every winter a new layer of clay gets shaved off and things get exposed. He grabbed hold of the front part of the skull and pulled it off.”

The next day, Waterhouse’s daughter told Beard, then a high school science teacher, about the find.

“She said her dad had found a sea lion jaw and would I like to have it?” he said. “I said sure, because when you’re teaching biology, you like to have lots of comparative anatomy stuff.”

When the student brought the skull in the next day, Beard said it was immediately obvious this find was far more exciting than first imagined.

“Because of the tusks it was obvious it was a walrus,” he said. “It still had this blue Ice Age clay attached to it, so I was very excited about it.”

Waterhouse took Beard to the site of the find and thus began a slow, painstaking process of digging the fragile bones out of the clay.

“Because it was an intertidal site, the water was crystal clear and you could just make out the outline of the skeleton, but as soon as you started to excavate, the water would go completely murky,” Beard said. “One day Don MacAlister, who was blind, asked if he could come down to help and it turned out he was great. With his manual dexterity he found a lot of the phalanges, metacarpals and things we probably wouldn’t have found.”

Beard donated the 70,000-ear-old bones to the Museum of Natural History and Rosie, as she was eventually to become known, took her first trip across the country, to be put back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

The journey in a way mirrored a far more remarkable migration that Beard said took place in ancient times.

“They actually think the walrus started out in the northern area of Canada and then migrated down the Pacific coast and became extinct in the northern areas of Canada,” Beard said. “At that time there was no isthmus of Panama, so they migrated around and came back up the Atlantic coast and migrated across northern Canada to where they are now. They have walrus fossils from all along the way that confirms this migration.”

Beard said he had been hoping to keep Rosie in Qualicum Beach, where she was first discovered, but when the call came in December asking for her back, he had no choice but to agree.

“The museum wanted to keep her and we thought our local MLA was going to be able to help, but it didn’t happen,” he said. “We’re really sad about it. We all feel it belongs here, but they own it and they reconstructed it, which cost a few thousand dollars.”

Like her ancient ancestors that moved on without her, Beard said he doubts Rosie will ever return.

news@pqbnews.com