What the bones of 10,000-year-old beluga whale can tell us about our capital's tale.
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On June 19, 1948, at the R.R. Foster Sand Pit on the east bank of the Rideau River in old Gloucester Township, excavator operator J.B. Rolland was scooping shovelfuls of sand for a local building project when he saw something unusual spill out from the hillside.
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Work was stopped as Rolland and fellow Foster employee Grant Harris examined what had been dug up. They were bones from some unknown animal, its remains buried about six metres from the river’s edge and at least that deep in the sandy terrain rising sharply up towards River Road (today’s Riverside Drive), a stone’s throw from Uplands Airport (now Ottawa International Airport) and a chip shot from the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club course.
“Horse bones?” a crewman wondered, according to one account of the discovery. “Those didn’t come from any horse,” Rolland is said to have replied. “And how would they be buried at the bottom of this pit? Must be something prehistoric, I’ll bet.”
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Harris made a phone call to the National Museum on McLeod Street in downtown Ottawa, today’s Canadian Museum of Nature. Paleontologist Charles M. Sternberg, son of the legendary American dinosaur hunter Charles H. Sternberg and a fossil-finding superstar in his own right — discoverer, among other things, of Canada’s first Tyrannosaurus rex in 1946 — drove the nine-kilometre route to Foster’s pit. Sternberg examined the exposed bones, then asked workers to dig around some more. They turned up additional remains, and Sternberg hauled the load back to his lab at the museum “for intensive study.”
We know all this thanks to a front-page Ottawa Citizen story published three days after the historic find. Sternberg didn’t take long to determine that Rolland had unearthed the skeleton of a white whale or Delphinapterus leucas — better known to most Canadians, thanks in part to a beloved 1979 children’s song by the Canadian musician Raffi as a beluga.
