The BC Government wants residents to vote on an official fossil symbol for BC, and the curator of the museum in Courtenay has strong beliefs on which one should be picked.
A massive collection of over 18,000 fossils dating back 52 million years were donated to the BC Royal Museum in August, which sparked the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development to open up a vote to pick from 7 different options.
The curator of Courtenay and District Museum and Paleontology Centre, Pat Trask, believes we should choose the Elasmosaur, a marine reptile that can grow to be 50 feet long.
Trask says the discovery of this reptile in 1988 contributed to the growth of the paleontology field in BC. "This discovery did that, it brought all of these people together, amateurs and professionals, for the first time. Now because of this elasmosaur discovery 30 years ago, all of this science is happening. Because of that we're having international scientists come to the Courtenay Museum and go through the collections that are here found on Vancouver Island, and describing new creatures."
The other candidates for official fossil are ammonite, salmon, lace crab, trilobite, ichthyosaur, and yabeina columbiana.
BC has a number of other official symbols, including the pacific dogwood as our official flower, jade as BC.’s gemstone, the steller’s jay as our official bird, the western red cedar as our official tree; the spirit bear is our mammal and the pacific salmon is BC.’s official fish.
A link to the voting page is found here, and a link to the Courtenay Museum is found here.