Travel
Exploring the staggering diversity and volume of the province’s Cretaceous sites
Like many parents, I became something of a dinosaur expert as my children became increasingly dino-obsessed. As they progressed from their first “Rawr” while holding a plastic stegosaurus to bombarding me with paleontology facts, I’ve followed along, learning as they grew. This summer, I piled my three boys (Carmelo, 12, Jax, 11, and Rocco, 9) into a rented Canadream RV to tour Alberta, searching for Tyrannosaurus rex and other giants of the Cretaceous period, which lasted from 143.1 to 66 million years ago. For one brilliant week, we drove more than 2200 kilometers around the province, dug for fossils, helped clean a yet-unnamed dinosaur and visited otherworldly landscapes. Here’s what we discovered.
Our journey began in Edmonton, at the University of Alberta Dino Lab, where anyone can sign up to assist in prepping and conserving the huge backlog of fossils that flow to the lab each year. There are so many fossils found in Alberta that they’ll never get ahead of this task, according to Howard Gibbins, who has been working as a technician and running the volunteer program at the lab for 13 years. Specimens have been coming in since 1920, and last year “About 400 items came in just from Dinosaur Provincial Park,” says Gibbins.
Gibbins started as a volunteer here and now oversees a team of some 75 volunteers, mostly made up of students and retirees. “We also run an evening lab and a lot of office types come after work, they just come to help clean the bones,” he explains.
My boys are put to work with paint brushes on a massive lump of something.
“Is that a T-rex bone?” asks Rocco.
“I believe it is an Albertosaurus pelvis. It’s broken,” Gibbins explains, “but we have the other bit — we just need to clean it so it fits back together.”
It seems nuts that my children are touching something that walked the Earth 71 million years ago. I confess, “I’m worried they might break something.”
“Ah,” Gibbins laughs. “Everybody breaks something eventually. That’s what glue is for.”
Unless they’re considered special, most fossils are put in storage and only pulled out for preparation when requested by students or professors at the University of Alberta. Lots of bones just aren’t that interesting. “Hadrosaurs are the cows of the Cretaceous, there are just so bloody many of the things. We find them all over the place,” explains Gibbins. But, rarer finds, such as articulated limbs, complete skeletons, or skulls, are made a prepping priority. Gibbins beams when he shows us the massive styracosaurus skull that he spent ten years working on — it’s the most complete example ever found, discovered in the Badlands just outside of Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Gibbins introduces us to a group of grad students who excitedly tell us that their work had been included in the Albertosaurus episode of the just-released BBC Walking with Dinosaurs mini-series. Christiana Garros’ thesis is on pathologies in therapods, which involves a lot of histology, taking thin slices of bone to examine injuries and disease. Jordan Stock is a paleoecologist. “I look at paleobotany, which is fossil plants and pollen, and all the dinosaurs, trying to put it all together and see how the world changes over two million years,” he explains. Henry Sharpe is a paleoartist and is finishing his thesis on mosasaurs.
“We were just looking at a dinosaur with gum disease if you guys wanna come see the skull in the other room,” invites Sharpe.
Do we ever?!
Garros shows us a jaw, then an articulated Albertosaurus arm. It is very cool. Sharpe found the arm on a dig last summer. “You know how Tyrannosaurs are usually depicted with two fingers? Most other dinosaurs have three fingers, like Alosaurus. Where did that third finger grow on the T-rex?” Sharpe says, “On this one we can see the third finger, it’s just really tiny with no claw. It’s vestigial.”
The boys brush a little of the dirt away from parts of a newly discovered dinosaur that is yet to be named (my eldest suggests “Carmelo-saurus”).
Then we visit the basement storage, which contains shelf after shelf of bones organized by species. Rocco gets to hold a giganotosaurus jaw, which he does, slightly terrified he’ll drop it because it is so heavy. We could have spent all day at the lab absorbing the contagious enthusiasm of everyone we encountered there, but we had to leave because Grand Prairie was the next stop.
Driving out of Grand Prairie, there’s nothing but farmlands until suddenly rises the beautiful Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum. Named for the paleontologist who helped found the Royal Tyrrell Museum, this is Grand Prairie’s biggest tourist attraction, drawing visitors from across Northern Alberta and beyond. It offers amazing opportunities for regular folks to join proper dinosaur digs at nearby Pipestone Creek bonebed, floats down the Wapiti River to fossil sites only accessible from the water, summer camps and a lab to volunteer with.
We meet with museum curator Dr. Emily Bamforth, whom we’d been lucky enough to go on a dig with last summer in Saskatchewan. Bamforth wanted to show us the bonebed, nicknamed “River of Death” because thousands of dinosaurs were buried there in layers after some kind of mass extinction event. “We’re uncovering 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” Bamforth explains, plus there’s amber and teeth, plant material, and fish scales — all part of what Bamforth calls “fossil coleslaw.” There are so many fossils that Bamforth’s team only works on a tiny area about five to six metres across per season. “We only expose what we can collect, because fossils start to disintegrate once they’re out in the open,” Bamforth says. These bones are 75 million years old.
For four hours, we chisel away at ironstone and dirt, working delicately with brushes around protruding bone pieces. Bamforth and her team — Jackson Sweder, the museum’s research and collections technician, and two brilliant summer students, Kai MacFarlane and Carbin Gomez — patiently explain what we are working on. We help wrap a Pachyrhinosaur femur in plaster. There’s a collective holding of breath as Sweder attempts to lift it from the dirt, and a loud curse from someone as it falls apart inside the plaster jacket. It’s hot, dusty work, and when Bamforth’s “paleo pooch” Aster disappears to the creek to cool off, we follow.
We return to the van sticky and grimy, but the boys cool down at a fishing spot between Grand Prairie and the next destination on our rather ambitious itinerary.
The next morning, we meet Bamforth at the CST Coal Mine in Grand Cache. She’s arranged for us to be escorted through the active mine site to see some of the world’s most impressive dinosaur footprints at the Grande Cache Dinosaur Tracksite. Wearing hard hats and steel-toe boots, we are driven in trucks out to two tracksites — and are wowed.
It’s estimated there are more than 100,000 footprints across the sheer rock faces uncovered by mining here. Viewing this tableau of tracks is mind-blowing. There are only a few footprint sites on this scale anywhere in the world, says Bamforth.
There are lines of massive ankylosaurus prints where these bulky tank-sized, thick-skulled beasts plodded their way through the mud. There are scraping marks that Bamforth tells us are crocodile swim tracks, and tiny, delicate therapods — note, all birds are therapod dinosaurs — tracks too. These footprints date back 90 million years.
For Bamforth, this site is amazing because the tracks give us clues to animal behaviour that cannot be learned from dinosaur bones. “And, tracksites often show us animals that don’t make it into the fossil record too often, especially smaller, more delicate animals and birds,” says Bamforth.
Tour over and coated in coal dust, we say goodbye to Bamforth and start our long drive south — with a few stops at Jasper, Banff and Calgary — to dinosaur central, Drumheller.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum is considered one of the best dinosaur museums in the world. Its collection of massive skeletons — most of which were found in the province — is truly epic, its ever-increasing array of educational opportunities is wonderful, and the preservation and cataloging that happens here has led to many important discoveries that have changed and challenged what we think we know about dinosaurs. It’s also turned Drumheller into a dinosaur theme park of sorts. We arrive late evening and park the RV right under Tyra, the world’s largest dinosaur, before heading to the campsite. The kids whoop with glee at the sight of her.
The usual population of this town sits around 8400, but between the May long weekend and early October, more than a million visitors head to Drumheller. “It’s all because of the dinosaurs,” says Drumheller mayor Heather Colberg, “And in 2017, the town council really owned being the dinosaur capital of the world.” Shortly after, someone had the idea of building the world’s largest dinosaur as a tourist attraction, and by 2000, Tyra — standing 25 metres tall, four times the size of an actual T-rex — stood proud. Climbing her 106 steps yields knockout views over the town and Badlands beyond.
Tyra is epic, and much adored by visitors, but her days are numbered. The Chamber of Commerce, who own Tyra, have decided she’ll be decommissioned in 2029 as they’ve decided to “refocus on our core mission: supporting local businesses, advocating on their behalf and fostering economic growth in Drumheller.” Colberg personally doesn’t want Tyra to be decommissioned and says the council are looking for a solution. “I was born and raised in this valley, and I watched that dinosaur go up, and unless there’s something structurally unsafe, she should stay,” Colberg says, “Sure, change direction, but leave the dinosaur.”
There are a couple of dinosaur-themed fun parks around Drumheller, and brightly painted steel and concrete dinosaur sculptures throughout downtown. Everywhere you look are nods to the prehistoric, and every business logo seems to run with the theme. My boys loved the museum, enjoying the many interactive exhibits, and the fossil-casting workshop I’d booked in advance.
While Drumheller is dinosaur tourism central, it’s Dinosaur Provincial Park that truly delivers the goods. An hour and 40 minutes’ drive south of Drumheller, more than half of the 88 species of dinosaur identified in Canada came from this one park. This Badlands park has many unique geological features and a huge cottonwood forest — a slash of lush green that runs along the banks of the Red Deer River in stark contrast to the dusty hills and hoodoos that have eroded away to reveal a seemingly endless amount of fossils. In fact, there are so many fossils here that unless you’ve found something truly remarkable, it just gets left in or on the ground, protected in place by some of the world’s strictest rules around fossil collection. It’s trippy to see an ankylosaurus femur just there sticking out of the side of the rock, knowing that this is no big deal for the paleontologists at the Royal Tyrrell.
Touring the park with Jessica Glombick, a geologist and head of visitor services at Dinosaur Provincial Park, delivers non-stop fossil action. “For late Cretaceous fossils, this is the best place in Alberta,” she tells us. Each time we step outside of her Jeep there are tiny fragments of bone, fish scales and dinosaur poop at our feet. We see little piles of teeth, and then — BAM — a massive bone, like something from the Flintstones, casually jutting out of a rock. “Oh, it’s just a bone, no big deal,” my boys start joking every time they find something cool.
Between 90 and 120,000 people visit the park each year, mostly between May and September, but the park is open year-round. You can stay in a replica fossil hunter’s camp along the river, if glamping is more your thing, and the park runs a huge range of hikes and tours, as well as guided excavations with paleontologists. The park has several active dig sites, and researchers come from all over the world to study this wealth of prehistoric material. “Last year, I toured a paleontologist from Japan, and he was losing his mind, like, ‘Look at this! Look at THIS!’ and we told him it just wasn’t good enough,” Glombick says, “If he found that thing in Japan, they would be celebrating for a month, but we’d just leave it on the ground.”
Dinosaur Provincial Park was a helluva bang to go out on in our mega-tour of the province, which the boys agree was the best trip they’ve ever had. “We’re kind of like paleontologists now, right?” says Rocco, “we know so much about dinosaurs.” Jax could have stayed at the dig sites for the whole summer, and I’m considering the Royal Tyrrell’s week long dino camp for them all next year. Carmelo is still split on whether he’ll study paleontology at the University of Alberta or Saskatchewan — but feels like he has plenty of friends in the field now to ask for advice. We all learned so much, and had an absolute blast along the way.
Dinosaurs are underfoot everywhere in this province, and searching them out is a grand adventure that I’m so glad we embarked on.
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