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| Dinosaur Provincial Park Fossil Dig |
It sprawls across the badlands of southeastern Alberta, a sunburned maze of hoodoos, gullies, bentonite clays, and wide, silent coulees where the Late Cretaceous still feels startlingly close.
If you know your dinosaurs — and I know you do — this is one of Earth’s most important bonebeds, rivaled only by the Gobi Desert and a few select pockets of Montana and Patagonia.
Roughly 75–77 million years ago, this region lay at the edge of a warm coastal plain along the interior Western Interior Seaway.
Think slow, looping rivers; cypress and fern marshes; balmy summers; and a very high probability of running into hadrosaurs (Corythosaurus, Lambeosaurus, Parasaurolophus), horned dinosaurs (Centrosaurus, Styracosaurus), tyrannosaurs, ankylosaurs, troodontids, turtles, champsosaurs, crocodilians, and freshwater fish.
Floods, storms, and meandering river channels buried carcasses in mud and silt, and nature did the rest — compacting and lithifying them into the Oldman and Dinosaur Park formations we know today.
How They Dig
Excavating in the park is old-school science at its most tactile. Crews begin by scouting — sometimes guided by erosion, sometimes by bone fragments that weather out of the hillsides. Once they’ve identified promising exposures, they get down on hands and knees with rock hammers, awls, brushes, and dental picks.
The key is going slow. These sediments are soft but unpredictable; a single Centrosaurus femur can shear if you rush. Bones are consolidated with glue-like hardeners as they’re exposed. For larger finds, crews build plaster jackets — soaked burlap dipped in plaster, wrapped around the fossil and supporting matrix like an orthopedic cast — then transport the slab out of the coulees by hand, ATV, helicopter, or small cart.
The jackets then head to prep labs in Drumheller or museums worldwide for meticulous cleaning under microscopes.
What They Find
The park is a jackpot for both skeletal and taphonomic diversity. Here you'll find:
- Bonebeds — catastrophic mass-death deposits, especially of Centrosaurus, interpreted as herd drownings during river floods or tropical storms.
- Articulated skeletons and partial individuals — gorgeous, curled-up hadrosaurs or ankylosaurs preserved in river channel sands.
- Microfossil sites — turtle shell, crocodile scutes, fish scales, tiny dinosaur teeth, and delicate vertebrae that tell the story of small-bodied fauna and paleoecology.
- Plant impressions — the background greenery of the Cretaceous world, from conifers to broad-leaved angiosperms.
It’s not uncommon for field seasons here to recover multiple new individuals, and historically the park has yielded more than 50 dinosaur species and thousands of catalogued specimens — a staggering contribution to paleontology.
The Visitor Experience
- What’s beautifully unique is that Dinosaur Provincial Park is both a research landscape and a public one. You can:
- Walk the badlands trails and stumble across weathering bone fragments (strictly look, no collecting).
- Join guided interpretive tours that take you into active restricted dig zones — a rare privilege, since most world-class bonebeds are off-limits.
- Visit the field stations where staff show plaster jackets, exposed bones, and explain how digs work.
- See fossils in situ at special display sites, where the bones are left exactly where they were found and protected under viewing shelters. It’s like peeking through a window into deep time.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum also runs programs out of the park — including multi-day paleontology experiences where visitors learn to prospect, excavate, and identify fossils under expert supervision. For many, that’s the closest they’ll ever come to being a field paleontologist.
Aside from being visually stunning (cinematographers love the badlands light), the park preserves one of the most detailed snapshots of Late Cretaceous continental ecosystems in the world.
Because the formations are stacked and time-resolved, researchers can read shifts in faunal communities, climate patterns, environments, and extinction pressures across a few million years — essentially watching ecosystems change in slow motion.
Can Folk Visit?
- Absolutely. It’s open to the public (with seasonal restrictions), but with a few courtesies:
- Stay on trails in open areas — the sediments are fragile and erosion is an active process.
- No fossil collecting — everything stays on the landscape for science.
- Book ahead for guided digs — they fill fast, especially in summer.
- Prepare for heat — badlands are oven-like in July and August.
It’s a place that manages to feel both ancient and alive. The silence carries, the rocks crumble under hand, and sometimes — if you’re lucky — a chip of bone glints from a slope where a Centrosaurus weathered out just last winter.
