Thursday October 29, 2026
Phys —
Rare, complete fossils of ancient fish discovered in Alberta are helping fill in the gaps in our knowledge about which freshwater fish were living in North America at the end of the age of the dinosaurs, and how they evolved into their modern descendants.
Donald Brinkman, Emeritus Researcher with the Royal Tyrrell Museum, says that while much is known about saltwater (marine) fish, we still have a poor understanding of their freshwater counterparts.
“Freshwater fossils are almost all isolated individual bones like jaws, and these are very difficult to work with taxonomically,” says Brinkman, who is also an adjunct professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Biological Sciences. “There are very few full skeletons, which is ideally what we want, to know what kind of fish it is and its relationship to modern groups.”
Fortunately, there is a site in central Alberta—appropriately named Pisces Point—that contains an abundance of complete fossil fish skeletons from ancient freshwater systems. Brinkman and his colleagues used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to uncover their secrets.