(Melfort & District Museum/Facebook)

By Cam Lee

Bison bones

Melfort Museum displaying historic bison bone collection

Aug 11, 2025 | 2:58 PM

A new display at the Melfort Museum looks back thousands of years.

The Bison Bones display is set up and the public is invited to take a look.

Curator Brenda Mellon told northeastNOW the museum was fortunate to receive the collection of bison bones from Peter Burns, who came across the bones while out on the North Saskatchewan River in 2019.

“The first day he discovered 51 items in the sandbar on the river,” Mellon said. “After that, he went back each summer until 2022, and he kept finding additional bones.”

Mellon said Burns collected and documented all the items, and he is good friends with museum board member Doug Chisholm and both went out to the site. Earlier this year, Burns and Chisholm made a presentation to students from Maude Burke School and to the general population during a Coffee and Conversation event.

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The bones date back 6,300 years, and Mellon said they were found close to Lower Hudson House, which was a Hudson’s Bay outpost in 1779.

Summer students at the museum and some volunteers have been further cataloguing the items.

“Now [the bones] are on display in our Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology Building, so we encourage people to stop by and check them out.”

Mellon said the museum has also received a set of skulls from Burns to add to the collection, and now there is most of a large bison that is on display.

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cam.lee@pattisonmedia.com