Unearthing a giant

Almost 30 years ago, paleontologist Elizabeth “Betsy” Nicholls made a discovery of colossal proportions

- NIKI WILSON

ON A SUMMER DAY in 1989, paleontologist Don Brinkman sat waiting for a helicopter pickup with the rest of his field crew in the Wapiti Lake area of British Columbia. It had been 10 days since they’d been dropped there, a known hotbed for fossils of early Triassic marine reptiles that lived up to 250 million years ago. After a week and a half of exploration, excavation, and living in a tent, the rest of the team was tired and sat gathered around flight-ready piles of collected specimens and equipment. But not Elizabeth “Betsy” Nicholls.

“Rather than waiting, Betsy was out looking for more fossils, and actually found a pretty significant one in the last hour before our departure,” says Brinkman, chuckling. It was a fossil of the species Grippia longirostris, a type of dolphin-like marine lizard known as an ichthyosaur. (Nicholls would be the first to identify this species in Canada and was instrumental in showing connections between finds in North America and Greenland.) Brinkman credits Nicholls’ passion and tenacity for the discovery that day. A powerhouse in her field, she was on the verge of making one of the most important discoveries in the history of marine paleontology.