When reality (almost) surpasses fiction. Wednesday, November 15, the horror film hits the screens Miners : the story of underground miners who discover, by chance, while digging an underground gallery, a crypt where a monstrous creature lives. Mystery and thrills guaranteed. However, this imaginary story echoes a somewhat similar adventure which, on the other hand, really happened, almost 150 years ago, in a Belgian coal mine.
At the bottom of a pit, a team of miners came across a real treasure: a cemetery of dinosaurs, and more particularly iguanodons. This animal lived on earth around 130 million years ago, during a period called the “Cretaceous”. The iguanodon was already known in the 19th century. The first identification of a specimen dated from 1825.
But scientists still knew little about this creature which was then thought to crawl, like a lizard or an iguana. Today, we know that the animal stood upright and measured up to 5 m high, thanks to the extraordinary discovery of two miners.
A tree covered in gold
Return to 1878. Jules Créteur and Alphonse Blanchard work for the coal mining company of Bernissart, a Walloon commune, located near Mons. The two men set off on reconnaissance, more than 300 meters underground, in search of a new coal seam. Because for several weeks, their team has stumbled upon a “notch”, a pocket filled with clay.
To be able to find the coal deposit as quickly as possible and exploit it, this pocket must be bypassed or drilled. It was finally while drilling through the clay that they came across the first vestige of an iguanodon. Unfortunately, they mistook it for a piece of fossilized wood and the first skeleton was destroyed.
The second one-on-one was the good one. This time, the fossil looked like a tree covered in gold, sparking more interest. Very quickly, the miners understood that gold was, in fact, only pyrite that appeared during the fossilization process. But who could this shiny piece of skeleton belong to? For the general agent of the coal mining company, it could well be “the bone of Father Adam”, the first man on earth, according to the Bible.
Crocodiles, fish, turtles…
“This hypothesis, in an era marked by deep Catholicism, was the reason why the news spread among the population,” we explain to the Bernissart iguanodon museum. It took a few days before the samples were truly identified by a zoologist from the University of Louvain, near Brussels.
The verdict is clear: these are iguanodon teeth. Dinosaurs lie between two seams of coal. The incredible news was announced by telegram to the Royal Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels: “Important discovery of bones in Bernissart coal fault STOP […] “.
For six months, archaeological excavations were undertaken at the bottom of the pit. No fewer than 29 complete (and two incomplete) iguanodon skeletons were found and exhumed. And that’s not all: two crocodiles, two turtles, a salamander, 3,000 fish divided into fifteen species (including fourteen new ones), a trace of the wing of an insect resembling a cicada, as well as ferns and pines of the time. Without forgetting a phalanx of megalosaurus, the ancestor of the terrible T-Rex.
An iguanodon skeleton at the museum
“This discovery has dramatically advanced knowledge of the world of dinosaurs. And to think that the miners almost missed it,” says the Bernissart museum. Since the beginning of the year, this cultural place has offered a new scenography which stages this fabulous paleontological adventure. At the heart of the site, a real skeleton found in the mine has sat majestically since 2005. And the iguanodon has become a real tourist attraction.
Moreover, some scientists believe that the Bernissart pit has not revealed all its secrets. In 2002, drilling carried out in the basement and seismic exploration methods showed that the clay “notch” still contained bone fragments. There are therefore probably other skeletons to be discovered. In the absence of an evil crypt.