A research team led by the Canadian Museum of Nature is heading to the High Arctic this week in search of bigger and better fossils in the remains of ancient forests.

The six researchers plan to excavate an ancient boreal-type forest at the Beaver Pond site on Ellesmere Island. In past years, scientists working in that area have found fossils of beavers, three-toed horses and even the ancestors of black bears.

Team leader Natalia Rybczynski, a palaeomammalogist with the Museum of Nature, said they now hope to discover even bigger animals there.

"We might expect to find a larger carnivore there because most of the carnivores we have so far are quite small," Rybczynski told CBC News Monday in Iqaluit.

Travelling with the team is Dick Harington, a researcher emeritus who specializes in ice-age fauna. He said the ancient forest at Beaver Pond is unique.

"There's no other site I know of at this latitude that really produces this range of fossils and this much background information on the paleo environment," he said.

Rybczynski said they also hope to determine the age of deposits in the area, currently believed to be up to five million years old.

"There's evidence of course of a much warmer climate because it's a forested, completely different ecosystem from what we see today," she said.

"So this research will tell us a little bit about climate change, what it was like before the Ice Ages came."

Rybczynski said the team will search for an older fossil forest further south on Ellesmere Island, before spending 10 days at the site of a crater on Devon Island.

A fossil forest there is known to be more than 20 million years old, and has yielded the fossils of primitive fish, deer and a metre-high rhinoceros. Scientists even discovered a new type of carnivore there last year.

The study is part of International Polar Year, a two-year global research effort to learn more about the Arctic.

The team's research begins as the Ottawa-based Museum of Nature is hosting a special summer exhibition on ice age mammals, for which Rybczynski and Harington were its scientific advisers. The exhibition, which opened in June, runs until Sept. 1 in Ottawa.