Earlier this month atits first Speaker Series of the season, a Royal Tyrrell Museum senior prep lab technician, Darren Tanke, presented his research into the life of Maurice Stefanuk, an amateur fossil collector whose findings in the Badlands around Drumheller are perhaps only surpassed by the story of the life he lived.
Tanke, who has been working on an ongoing series of biographies on the “average people who did extraordinary things” in the field of palaeontology, was a friend of Stefanuk (1924-2016), a “quiet and gentle-giant character,” but one whose passion, and a little bit stubbornness, led him to find both amazing finds in the field and a long-lost love late into his long life.
Tanke said he met Stefanuk first in 1983, after Tanke had moved to Drumheller to assist the Provincial Museum of Alberta (the museum’s palaeontology department would later become the Royal Tyrrell).
“There was this one guy who was about 60 and he just kind of stood out -- not by his age but his physical stature. He had all kinds of interesting stories to tell and all of us in our early 20s really hadn’t any.”
The two would continue to keep a relationship until late into Stefanuk’s life, where he would volunteer to assist various projects with the museum, as well as contribute a number of significant finds to the field of palaeontology, a passion which started at a young age for Stefanuk.
Stefanuk was born in Drumheller in 1924, living in Newcastle where a love of fossil collecting blossomed which would remain for the rest of his days. Stefanuk found a dinosaur tooth when he was six years old, that of a tyrannosaur, and he remained fixated on finding more of this species in the badlands surrounding Drumheller.
He grew up, and as he entered high school World War II broke out, and it is believed Stefanuk dropped out of high school to serve in the Canadian Navy, where once on wartime leave and back in Drumheller, he met a Jean Campbell, who gifted him a photo of herself which he kept in his wallet while on duty. After the war he returned to find Campbell was engaged to an Air Force sergeant which had him resolve to live the life of a bachelor for the rest of his days.
Stefanuk worked various jobs in Drumheller during his life, but his first big dinosaur find came in 1983 when he discovered Albertosaurus fossils near Drumheller, which would be donated to the museum, along with a number of other specimens throughout his life.
“Most people in palaeontology would love to find a nice tyrannosaur skeleton in their career and Maurice found two,” Tanke says.
Stefanuk worked briefly on a couple temporary contracts with the museum and also assisted in scouting dig sites for palaeontologist Loris SS. Russell in the 1980s, rugged work involving hiking the Badlands in high temperatures -- tough work for the aging man. He soldiered on, however, and continued to search for bonebeds and fossils well into his eighties, when a bad hip and mobility issues made it too painful for him to walk his beloved badlands anymore.
But maybe the best discovery of his life wasn’t palaeontological in nature, but came when in 2007 Stefanuk was spotted by Tanke in the then IGA grocery store with a lady hanging on his arms. Tanke says he ran into him a few times, with Stefanuk ducking away from him, but Tanke eventually cornered him in the cart corral and he fessed up. He had gotten into contact with Jean Campbell, his wartime sweetheart whose marriage to that Air Force sergeant had led him to swear off women for life. She was trying to convince him to marry her back in Ontario, and he asked Tanke for some advice.
“‘She wants me to leave Drumheller, what should I do?’ he said. I said, you’re 86 and still a bachelor -- go do it!”
“Isn’t that amazing? When I first met him he didn’t have a lot of good things to say about women, he said that they were bad and they were trouble. But he got the girl eventually. Love finds a way, but man oh man did it take a long time.”
Stefanuk passed away after a short illness in Pickering, Ontario in 2016 at the age of 91. But he never forgot all those years on the hunt for tyrannosaur teeth in the badlands. Tanke says he would write back to friends saying, “I miss the hills of Drumheller.”
Tanke’s research is published in an article online but he is still seeking information on Stefanuk for a bigger work in progress. Anyone with additional information or even snippets of conversation with Stefanuk are encouraged to look up his number in the phone book.
