Okay – this is majorly geeky, so fairly warned, right?
Canadian Forces Base Comox is primarily operated as an air force base by the Royal Canadian Air Force and is one of two bases in the country using the CP-140 Aurora anti-submarine/maritime patrol and surveillance aircraft. Its primary RCAF lodger unit is 19 Wing, commonly referred to as 19 Wing Comox.
CFB Comox’s airfield is also used by civilian aircraft. The civilian passenger terminal building operations are referred to as the Comox Valley Airport operated by the Comox Valley Airport Commission. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) airport code is YQQ.
In late November 1988, Mike Trask and his 12-year-old daughter Heather were prospecting for fossils along the Puntledge River just west of the city. Mike was advancing in the lead, kneeling every few meters to examine a particular fossil and to mark it with chalk, for later extraction by Heather following close behind.
Suddenly, as she examined a fossil that her father had just outlined, Heather noticed a group of concretions rising from the exposed shale less than a meter away. Upon further excavation, both she and Mike were astonished to discover a group of fossilized bones from some great beast, as-yet unknown and extinct since the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.
After months of investigation and correspondence with scientists such as the late Dr. Betsy Nicholls at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in southern Alberta, their discovery proved to be the first Elasmosaur recorded in British Columbia — the first of its kind west of the Canadian Rockies.
Casts of the skeleton of a 40ft-long adult Elasmosaur are suspended from the ceiling at the Comox Airport, and at the Courtenay and District Museum and Paleontology Centre. The original fossilized bones found by Trask and his daughter are also on exhibit.