Just off the east coast of Newfoundland, in the waters of Conception Bay, lies Bell Island. It’s only about 34 square kilometres, but for much of the 20th century, it was one of the most important iron ore producers in the world. The Bell Island mines extended beneath the sea floor, and the ore they pulled up helped fuel the Allied war effort. It was important enough that Nazi U-boats attacked the island — not once, but twice — during the Second World War.

Its coastline is almost all sheer cliff, rising high above the waves, and the land beneath is still riddled with old tunnels and even older stories.

This is one of them — the tale of a strange fossil that turned up in the mine in 1902. It’s based on the firsthand accounts of Arthur House, the miner who saw it with his own eyes. He shared his knowledge of Bell Island, and his memories of the fossil find with the Daily News in 1939.

Bell Island Mystery Fossil

It was the winter of 1902, and deep beneath the surface of Bell Island, a steam drill was carving its way through solid rock when it struck something unexpected — something ancient.

The drill chewed into the stone, and what it revealed wasn’t just ore but fossilized bones. Massive ones, unlike anything the miners had seen before.

black and white image of Miners of the Wabana iron ore mine on Bell Island, Newfoundland (c. 1907) — *Miners of the Wabana iron ore mine on Bell Island, Newfoundland (c. 1907),* *Internet Archive Book Images, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons*

Arthur Howse, the mine captain for the Dominion Company, was there that day. Decades later, in 1939, he wrote down the story — a remarkable account of one of the strangest discoveries ever made beneath the island.

It happened near the ore body, about 100ft from the outcrops, below ten feet of solid iron and eight feet of forest-capped rock. One of the vertical shafts blasted by steam drill broke into something strange lodged in the foot wall. It looked like bone. Old bone. Fossilized and badly fractured from the mining operations, but still clearly something once alive.

They could see a body, a wing and a tail.

House wasn’t a man without experience. Born in Pool’s Island and educated in St. John’s, he’d once trained for the ministry and worked as a teacher before finding his calling underground. By 1902, he was running crews, managing tunnels, and keeping a steady hand on the iron ore operations of Bell Island. But he also had a good eye — and knew when he was looking at something unusual.

With the mine manager away on holiday, House brought the find to two other men: F.W. Angel and C.J. Stewart. Together, they agreed to excavate it carefully, removing the fragments piece by piece as the tunnel work moved forward. It took days.

Once they had the pieces, they brought them to a church hall on The Green near the mine. The men had rented out the lower floor to use a as social club, and that’s where the fossil came back to life.

By night they worked — fitting bone to bone on the hall floor. They had no palaeontology experience, but with steady hands they puzzled it together.

And when it was done?

The creature they’d uncovered was nothing short of astonishing.

It measured over eight meters (27ft) from tip to tail.

*This AI-generated sketch of the ‘fictional’ Teramorphons Dinosaurian Housei blends science, imagination, and speculation.*

The tail alone stretched twelve feet and ended in a split fin — sharp and triangular, almost like a shark’s. The body was wide and solid, about eight feet long. Then came the neck — long and tapering — leading to an elongated head. One wing was fully extended, as if caught mid-motion. The other looked crumpled beneath the weight of the body. And along the limbs and wings were claw-like extensions — jutting out sharply.

Stewart, one of the men who helped piece it together, sketched the fossil and gave it a name: Teramorphons Dinosaurian Housei. It sounded grand and mysterious. Like something out of an old science journal.

No one wrote down exactly what it meant, but it seems to have been cobbled together from scraps of Latin and Greek — “tera” for monster, “morph” for shape or form. So, something like “monster-shaped thing.” The kind of name a someone might invent while staring at a creature no textbook could explain. The “Housei” bit, was doubtlessly in homage to House.

While they may have had fun with the name, they took the find seriously. They made blueprints and planned to set the fragments in plaster. They sent the drawings to Dr. Adams at McGill University who, House recalled, called it “the most important fossil discovery in 100 years.”

Not everyone shared Arthur House’s excitement.

When spring arrived, the church hall where the fossil had been laid out was needed for other things. Angel gave the order to have the fossil moved, but didn’t leave any special instructions. No careful handling. No warnings.

A team from the stables came with a box cart, loaded up the fragments like they were just another pile of rubble, and hauled them off to the old Mine House yard. There, they dumped the whole lot onto the ground.

What the mining operations hadn’t broken, the cart ride and careless tipping finished off.

“When we found out what had happened,” House later wrote, “we were very much annoyed.”

Still, he tried to save what he could.

He sent word to James P. Howley, Newfoundland’s Government geologist at the time. Howley made the trip from St. John’s, and the two men spent three days going over the remaining pieces. With the help of Stewart’s drawing and some rough measurements, they were able to reconstruct enough of the creature to get a solid sense of its size and form.

But from there, the trail goes cold.

Some folks believe the fossil is still on Bell Island, buried beneath a building or paved over during later construction. Others say it was deliberately destroyed — tossed over the cliffs by miners who feared that the scientific attention such a fossil might bring would shut down the mine and cost them their jobs.

No one knows for sure.

A Question of Timing

More than a century after the fossil was found — and lost — the CBC revisited the story. They spoke with a paleontologist who pointed out a major problem with the idea of a pterosaur fossil in Bell Island. The sedimentary rocks that make up Bell Island are incredibly old — they existed more than 200 million years before the first known pterosaurs ever took to the skies.

In other words, if the fossil really was from a winged reptile, it didn’t belong in that rock — a creature can’t be fossilized in stone that already exists.

Still, there was room for an unlikely — but possible — explanation. If the animal had fallen into a deep crevice, or some kind of sinkhole long after the original rocks had formed… and if it was quickly buried under the right kind of sediment… then maybe, just maybe, a fossil could have formed in a newer layer hidden within the older ones.

An Alternate Account?

In February of 1902 — right around the time Arthur House recalled the strange fossil turning up underground — a short piece appeared in the Evening Telegram, one of St. John’s daily newspapers.

It was only a few lines long, but the article described a “valuable fossil” discovered on Bell Island, unearthed during work on a tunnel twenty-six feet below the surface. According to the report, the fossil was sixteen feet long and shaped like a horse mackerel — a fish.

A newspaper clipping from February 1902 reading "A valuable fossil -- while working at a tunnel 26ft below the surface of Bell Island, the men found a fossil in the shape of a horse mackerel. It has been put in a box and will be sent..." — *Evening Telegram, February 24, 1902, MUN DAI*

Another mention came in March, 1902 decrying the possibility that the rare ‘fish-fossil’ might be sent to a foreign museum. Then in May, a further reference suggested the fossil was being held in the schoolhouse and that some pieces remained in ‘the ore’.

The details don’t entirely match House’s account. He remembered a creature with wings and talons, though he did describe it as having the fishy characteristic of a shark-like tail.

If these articles are describing the same fossil — and it seems quite likely to me that they are — then these brief clippings may be some of very few contemporary records of the discovery.

Some degree of discrepancy can be understood, I think. Newspapers don’t always get it right — especially when reporting on something unfamiliar. And memory, even a careful one, can shift over time. Add to that a fossilized skeleton, already damaged by blasting, pulled out in pieces and puzzled together on the floor; it’s not hard to imagine how different eyes might have seen different things.

World-Renowned Fossils

Pterosaur or not, there are still many stories hidden in the rocks of Newfoundland and Labrador. For years, scientists, collectors, and curious minds from around the world have come here to study the ancient past recorded in our rocks. Bell Island, in particular, is known internationally for its trace fossils — delicate imprints of life from half a billion years ago: the trails, tracks, and burrows of trilobites and other soft-bodied sea creatures that once crawled along a seafloor where miners would one day walk.

And while no confirmed dinosaur bones have ever been unearthed on the island itself, the same can’t be said for the continental shelf. During offshore oil drilling on the Grand Banks, far below the surface of the Atlantic, drilling rigs reportedly encountered the fossilized remains of dinosaurs, deep beneath the ocean floor.

What Can We Say for Sure?

An image of a pterosaur soaring over cliffs and ocean at sunset.

Well, in 1902 newspapers told of a large fossil. In 1939 Arthur House, a mine captain, recalled his role in unearthing an enormous fossil of a winged creature with talons and a tail from beneath Bell Island.

The fossil (or its fragments) are still missing and as for the drawings — well, I wish I could say. If they still exist, I haven’t seen any reference to their location.

For more than a hundred years, the tale of the Bell Island fossil has lingered in the hazy space between fact and folklore, as a sort of unfinished puzzle.

The only thing we can say for sure, is that the ‘Bell Island Pterodactyl’ —as it’s often called— proves, once and for all, that if anything can outlast rock, it’s the lure of a good mystery.