Calgary thrift store gets some really old donations, like 450 million years old

A Goodwill store in Calgary is used to getting old donations. But recently, they had to redefine old.

"Based on images we have, it looks like this material is from the Cretaceous period, so 145 million to 66 million years old," Brandon Strilisky told CBC News in a Wednesday phone interview.

Strilisky is in charge of collections management at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alta.

"There is a piece of coral in there as well. That piece is probably about 450 million years old, from the Ordovician."

He's talking about a box left at the Goodwill donation centre in southeast Calgary.

Daoud Abbasi of Goodwill received that donation about a month ago. He knew he had something special on his hands.

"My dad is an engineer, so our best trips were to Royal Tyrrell," he saidwith a laugh.

"We touched and felt them," he saidof the mystery donation.

"They didn't feel like your typical rock. Our aim is to put every donation we get to the right home."

Abbasi wanted to do some sleuthing about the find.

"I started uploading some pictures on the digital atlas app. I had a few comments, they think they are from ceratopsian time but not sure. I sent an email to Royal Tyrrell to see if they can help me out. They got back to me in a couple of days. They definitely have relevance, so they wanted more pictures."

Strilisky at Royal Tyrrell says Alberta is a hotbed of fossil activity. This donation, based on photos he's seen, is really interesting.

"There's some petrified wood, there is some dinosaur bone that is probably either hadrosaur or ceratopsian," he said.

"It's all very fragmentary, so it's really difficult to tell what type of animal it's from. So we can't be really diagnostic and narrow it down to a specific geographical part of the province or geologic age or type of dinosaur."

Despite not having all the answers, Strilisky says people send fossils to the dinosaur museum pretty much daily.

"They can reach out to us, tell us where they found it, send in a photo," he said.

"Most of the time, we can take a good guess as to what type of dinosaur it was. This material is more likely to be used for our teaching collection."

The surprise donation will be heading to the museum about 100kilometres northeast of Calgary in the coming days.