By: Julie Gordon
TORONTO (REUTERS).- The Canadian oil sands, a vast expanse of tar and sand being mined for crude oil, yielded treasure of another kind this week when an oil company worker unearthed a 110-million-year-old dinosaur fossil that wasn’t supposed to be there. The fossil is an ankylosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur with powerful limbs, armor plating and a club-like tail. Finding it in this region of northern Alberta was a surprise because millions of years ago the area was covered by water. “We’ve never found a dinosaur in this location,” Donald Henderson, a curator at Alberta’s Royal Tyrrell Museum, which is devoted to dinosaurs, said on Friday. “Because the area was once a sea, most finds are invertebrates such as clams and ammonites.” The ankylosaur that was found by the oil worker is expected to be about 5 meters (16-1/2 feet) long and 2 meters (6-1/2 feet) wide. “It is pretty amazing that it survived in such good condition,” said Henderson, noting the fossil was th