Retired geologist takes Calgarians on a fossil discovery tour outside a Safeway

Many Calgary buildings are clad and decorated with Tyndall limestone, a material that's chock full of fossils. Videojournalist Darren Wright got a tour.

Talk about a historical tour! A retired Calgary geologist hosted a fossil discovery tour Sunday through the heart of Calgary, where he showed participants examples of fossils that were 450 million years old.

Best of all, the group didn’t need to drive to Drumheller to see ancient rocks -- instead, they just met outside the Safeway store in Kensington.

There, 10 large blocks of tyndall stone, originally from the famed Tyndall Formation in Manitoba, which have been serving as rest spots for weary shoppers for years, are actually full of corals, sponges, nautloids, algae, pelecypods, starfish and brachiopods that are all preserved in the limestone.

• The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App

Tako Koning hosted about 25 people Sunday, including a family from Kenya and a girl from Hong Kong. He’s given the tour in the past, for the Canadian Energy Geoscience Association and the Alberta Wilderness Association and Alberta Paleontological Association -- but when he first discovered that the Safeway limestone blocks were full of fossils, he didn’t believe it.

" I had never noticed it," he said. “I’ve walked through here many, many times, and, and then suddenly I noticed this fossil, and that led to me checking out all these all these blocks here, and finding a whole different variety of fossils.

“And that led to me doing this tour.”

After examining the ancient rocks outside Safeway, Koning escorted the group up to the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), where he said the cladding on the Senator Patrick Burns Building is also full of fossils.

Once he realized what he was seeing, Koning did some fact-checking.

“I checked with some experts, some expert paleontologist at University of Calgary, University of Saskatoon, and took pictures of these rocks, and then they confirmed that what I was looking at, the age I was looking at, and the species of fossils. So everything that I show here has been confirmed by experts in the field,” he said.

Tour participants gave Koning’s tour two thumbs up.

“This tour has done a really excellent job of making us all aware of the incredible pre-historic wonders that you can find, just on your doorstep,” said one woman. “It’s really, really cool.”

“Rocks hold a lot of history i them,” said a man, “and most people are just sort of strolling by and this gives you another level of appreciation for history -- for maybe the history of Calgary and definitely the history of the planet.”