(Photo: Wendy Sloboda)
Wendy Sloboda is a professional photographer in Alberta. For 30 years, she's been finding and photographing thousands of fossils, leading to the classification of many previously unknown dinosaur species.
She's a crack dinosaur hunter, so it's only appropriate that she gets one of her own! The Wendiceratops pinhornensis was a hippopotamus-sized horned dinosaur related to the triceratops. It lived about 75 to 79 million years ago. Sloboda, who found a fossilized one 5 years ago, was so delighted by the honor that she had an artist's recreation of the dinosaur tattooed on her arm. The CBC describes her remarkable gift for sniffing out fossils:
The paleontologists dig at sites discovered the previous year — often by Sloboda, Evans says.
"We often joke that we're Wendy's cleanup crew because Wendy runs around the badlands and finds all this cool stuff and we basically come in afterwards and do the digging," he added. "She just has a sixth sense for finding good specimens."
Sloboda drives out to other areas and hikes with a small group, usually students, to go "prospecting" — looking for rocks sticking out of the dirt that she recognizes as fossils from their unusual colour, texture or shininess.
"It's really hard to explain," she said.
-via Marilyn Terrell