On a summer day in 1989, paleontologist Don Brinkman sat waiting for a helicopter pickup with the rest of his field crew in the Wapiti Lake area of British Columbia. It had been 10 days since they’d been dropped there, a known hotbed for fossils of early Triassic marine reptiles that lived up to 250 million years ago. After a week and a half of exploration, excavation and living in a tent, the rest of the team was tired and sat gathered around flight-ready piles of collected specimens and equipment. But not Elizabeth “Betsy” Nicholls.

“Rather than waiting, Betsy was out looking for more fossils, and actually found a pretty significant one in the last hour before our departure,” says Brinkman, chuckling. It was a fossil of the species Grippia longirostris, a type of dolphin-like marine lizard known as an ichthyosaur. (Nicholls would be the first to identify this species in Canada and was instrumental in showing connections between finds in North America and Greenland.) Brinkman credits Nicholls’ passion and tenacity for the discovery that day. A powerhouse in her field, she was on the verge of making one of the most important discoveries in the history of marine paleontology.

In 1992, Nicholls, then curator of marine reptiles at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., was alerted to an unusual find. An archeologist had stumbled upon some bones while conducting a survey along a stretch of the Sikanni Chief River near Pink Mountain, B.C., and had thought Nicholls and her colleagues should take a look. When schedules aligned two years later, she, Brinkman and a small field crew ventured into the remote area to check it out. Those bones turned out to be a massive ichthyosaur that would blow previous size records for the giant reptiles out of the Triassic water. 

“We were overwhelmed at the size of it,” said Nicholls in a video celebrating her Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2000. She and Brinkman knew it was an ichthyosaur that was bigger than anything they’d seen. But at the time, the cost and logistics of removing the giant animal seemed insurmountable. There was no road access to the site, and the fossil was embedded in hard stone and submerged until water levels dropped in mid-summer, leaving a short excavation window. This meant it would take multiple years to get it out. “I didn’t forget it, because it was being washed away by the river, and I thought, gee, wouldn’t it be nice to salvage this — it’s being destroyed,” said Nicholls. “But I thought it was really out of the question.”