Dig This: Canada’s Fertile Dinosaur Country Still Has Plenty of Well-Preserved Bones to Pick

It was just before nightfall and thunderheads rumbled across southwestern Alberta, sending warm winds moaning through the contorted pillars of sandstone in the Red Deer River Valley.

Lightning flickered on the horizon, eerily illuminating 70 people crawling around on their hands and knees, heads bowed towards the cracked earth as if worshipping some fearful deity.

Their boots and clothes splattered gray with the sticky bentonite clay that mires these badlands, a casual observer would hardly take them for a brigade of respected international paleontologists. They were having a field day on the site of the world’s richest deposit of dinosaur bones.

We watched the cool academic atmosphere evaporate into childlike excitement as we trekked past bones lying scattered about and protruding from gully walls.

“I’m overwhelmed,” said Dr. Allan Simpson, a paleontologist from London. “Anywhere else in the world we spend weeks searching for a single fragment,” he said, pointing his geologist’s pick at a six-foot-long Lambosaurus leg bone on the ground. “Here, you’re practically walking on them with every step.”

That unforgettable scenario happened three years ago, when we were invited to join the scientists on a field trip during an international symposium on dinosaur ecosystems.

Last summer we returned, eager to further explore this fascinating region of the Canadian prairies.

Alberta’s Dinosaur Country follows a miniature Grand Canyon carved through the flat prairie by the Red Deer River between the town of Drumheller, about 125 miles northeast of Calgary, and Dinosaur Provincial Park to the south.

Over eons, the muddy river along this 60-mile stretch has washed away 70 million years worth of sediment, exposing 35 different dinosaur species representing almost every type known from the Late Cretaceous Period.

One of the highlights of the trip is the spectacular Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, where dozens of dinosaurs have been re-created and displayed.

Many of those have been excavated from within Dinosaur Provincial Park, 15,000 acres so rich in well-preserved remains that it was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, joining such natural wonders as the Great Barrier Reef, Galapagos Islands and Yellowstone National Park.

Driving from Calgary through gently rolling farmland, the road abruptly descends into the weird landscape of the Red Deer River Valley, where barren walls rise like a 500-foot-high layer cake, with alternating stripes of chalky white, gray, black and mud brown, a cross section millions of years old.

Standing in clusters are “hoodoos,” tall outcroppings of eroded sandstone topped with large rocks that makes these odd formations appear as though they’re wearing hats. Prickly pear cactus and wind-borne tumbleweed put the finishing touches on the scene.

But, as the displays at Dinosaur Provincial Park’s field station explain, this region looked vastly different when the dinosaurs roamed here. The middle of the North American continent was covered by the vast inland Bearpaw Sea, and Alberta terrain was lush, similar to the cypress swamps of present-day Florida or Louisiana.

Last summer it was a withering 95 degrees outside when we joined a group of visitors for a naturalist-guided walk through a maze of hillocks and gullies to fossilized clam beds, a patch of dinosaur egg shards and past countless sites yet to be excavated.

When the volcanic clay soil swells in rain, then quickly washes away, new bits of bone are constantly exposed. Then after scientists decide a find is rare or enough intact for further study, a chunk of the sandstone surrounding the specimen is cut out and wrapped in layers of burlap and plaster into a papier-mache-like “jacket.”

It is then hoisted by truck or airlifted by helicopter to the field station or museum, where it joins about a hundred other jackets awaiting the bones to be removed from the stones, a painstaking process that can take a year or longer.

At the football-field-sized Centrosaurus Bone Bed, 10 young people worked in the dust with brushes and picks excavating up to 50 bones per square yard.

“Think there’s going to be a few cases of ‘paleo-belly’ today,” predicted one of them. He was referring to the white belly/burnt backside syndrome acquired from bending over in the broiling sun all day, just one of the hardships that volunteers must endure, in addition to mosquito bites and aching muscles.

The volunteers are chosen from among hundreds of applicants from around the world, all vying for the opportunity to spend a three-week stint digging up ancient bones.

Since work started in 1979, this bone bed has yielded about 75 of the Centrosaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur that sported a fancy neck frill and a single nose horn.

But Dr. Phillip Currie, head of dinosaur research at the Tyrrell Museum, believes that there are remains of well over a thousand of the species lying here.

“The large concentration of bones from middle-aged dinosaurs tells us this was probably a mass death,” Currie said. “We think the animals drowned trying to cross a river.”

Currie believes that gigantic herds in the tens of thousands once roamed southern Alberta, having migrated south in winter from what is now Alaska to lay their eggs and raise their young. “It must have looked something like the wildlife reserves of Africa,” he said.

The world’s most important dinosaur find in half a century came in 1987, when a 19-year-old museum volunteer stumbled across 14 dinosaur nests in the Milk River region of southern Alberta.

Although dinosaur eggs and hatched baby bones had been found before, these were the first eggs ever discovered containing complete fetuses. The cucumber-shaped eggs of duckbill dinosaurs, called hadrosaurs, are about eight inches long and four wide, and some scientists regard them as a missing link in paleontology.

Since warm-blooded creatures grow faster than cold-blooded creatures, the eggs may ultimately prove that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, unlike reptiles. They may also show that dinosaurs raised their young until they were a certain age before joining the herds.

In the Tyrrell Museum, a display shows the fetal leg bone about the size of an adult index finger lying alongside the leg bone of a four-ton, 38-foot-long fully grown hadrosaur.

“You’ll be spoiled for natural history museums after you’ve been to the Tyrrell,” Dr. Juan Estevez, a paleontologist from Madrid jokingly warned us over buffalo burgers at the Patricia Hotel near the park as we set off toward Drumheller and thehighly regarded museum.

We took the leisurely route called the Dinosaur Trail through a town called Wayne (pop.: 70), where the Last Chance Saloon, with its wagon wheels and weathered steer horns out front, was too much to resist.

A row of sweat-stained cowboy hats hang on the wall inside next to an old pool table and piano. The bartender told us that this was a boomtown of 2,500 people in the 1930s when half a dozen mines in the area were following coal seams. Maybe that’s why they keep the 1937 calender pinned on the wall.

From Wayne to Rosedale, 11 old one-lane bridges stitch together a route through a ghost valley littered with rusted coal-mining machinery that was abandoned when oil became a cheaper source of fuel in the 1940s.

Wayne Marshall’s Cretaceous Creations Shop stands near the suspension bridge leading over the Red Deer River to the remains of the Star Coal Mine in the town of Aerial.

Alongside the Coke sign at the outside takeout window is the tibia of a duckbilled dinosaur. Like so many residents in these parts, Marshall is a collector. He sells the fossilized and crystallized bones, ginkgo seeds, pine cones and oyster shells he has found, alongside chewing gum and candy bars.

In Drumheller, there has always been a steady stream of visitors to the old Fossil Museum just past the tacky great green fiberglass dinosaur that sits at the city limits.

But since the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology opened in September, 1985, the small town has been overwhelmed by the flood of more than half a million visitors who annually come to see the showcase of Alberta’s Dinosaur Country.

Earth tones and strong horizontal lines blend the ultra-modern museum into the stratified desert surroundings, and cool lagoons beckon like an oasis outside the front doors.

Although the Tyrrell includes 45,000 dinosaur specimens, the museum is not just about dinosaurs; it’s a celebration of three billion years of life on earth.

There’s the Palaeon-Conservatory, an indoor science garden where living descendants of plants that grew 350 million years ago flourish in the humid environment.

A picture window overlooks the dusty preparation laboratory where technicians work. One of them has spent a year using delicate dental instruments to extract the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the largest flesh-eating animal that ever walked the earth, from a 2 1/2-ton chunk of sandstone measuring nine by six feet.

A technician, wearing a “Too Cool For Extinction” T-shirt showing a dinosaur with dark glasses under his lab coat, explained that these beasts had teeth like steak knives, serrated for tearing.

A backstage tour took us through a warren of laboratories (bulletin boards plastered with Gary Larson’s offbeat dinosaur cartoons), assembly areas for skeletons and the storage warehouses that make this museum a first-class research facility.

In the great Dinosaur Hall, some of the 200 skeletons that help make the Tyrrell home of the world’s biggest dinosaur collection loom overhead.

One of the most popular exhibits at the museum is a bank of computer terminals where you can play a learning game about prehistoric footprints or design your own dinosaur piece by piece. Then the computer explains the reasons your creature could never have survived.

The museum brings to life ancient creatures that once ruled the world by using the most stimulating methods created in the minds of today’s dominant species on Earth.