Dinosaur Provincial Park: Alberta's Late Cretaceous Fossil Field

Dinosaur Provincial Park is a protected area of badlands in the Red Deer River valley of south-eastern Alberta, Canada, and one of the richest dinosaur fossil sites in the world. Its rocks, laid down roughly 76.5 to 75 million years ago, have yielded hundreds of skeletons from dozens of species. The park was created in 1955 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

A Late Cretaceous coastal plain

During the Late Cretaceous Period, a shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway divided North America in two. Southern Alberta lay on its western shore, a warm, low coastal plain crossed by meandering rivers flowing east from the young Rocky Mountains.

The rivers carried sand and mud that buried bones and carcasses on sandbars and floodplains. Most fossils come from the Dinosaur Park Formation, a layer of river and floodplain sediments that sits between the older Oldman Formation and the marine shales of the Bearpaw Formation, deposited when the sea later spread back over the land.

The climate was warmer than Alberta’s today. Plant fossils, pollen and the remains of turtles, crocodile relatives, fish and amphibians point to a humid lowland with forests and swamps, rich enough to support a crowded community of large plant-eaters and the predators that hunted them.

How the badlands formed

The fossils lay buried for tens of millions of years until the end of the last ice age. As the great ice sheets melted, from roughly 13,000 years ago, torrents of meltwater cut deep valleys into the soft prairie bedrock.

Rain, frost and wind have kept eroding these slopes ever since, producing the gullies, ridges and mushroom-shaped pillars called hoodoos that give the area its striking look. The same erosion constantly exposes new bones, which is why fossils are still being found every year.

The Canadian dinosaur rush

Scientific interest began in the late nineteenth century. In 1884 Joseph Burr Tyrrell of the Geological Survey of Canada found the skull of a large meat-eating dinosaur, later named Albertosaurus, further up the Red Deer River near present-day Drumheller. In 1897 and 1898 the survey’s palaeontologist Lawrence Lambe explored the river by boat and reported rich fossil beds in the area that is now the park.

The real rush came after 1910. Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York floated down the river on a flatboat that served as a camp and field base, collecting skeletons for several seasons. Concerned that Canada’s best fossils were leaving the country, the Geological Survey hired the fossil collector Charles H. Sternberg and his sons George, Charles M. and Levi in 1912.

The two teams worked the badlands in friendly but real competition until about 1917, when the First World War and shrinking budgets slowed the work. Their specimens went to museums in New York, Ottawa, Toronto and elsewhere, and many species first described from this period, such as Corythosaurus and Styracosaurus, are still textbook dinosaurs.

What the park has revealed

Few places preserve such a complete picture of a dinosaur community. Horned dinosaurs such as Centrosaurus, Styracosaurus and Chasmosaurus, duck-billed hadrosaurs such as Corythosaurus, Lambeosaurus and Prosaurolophus, armoured ankylosaurs and the tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus all lived here, along with small feathered predators known mostly from teeth and partial skeletons.

Estimates of the total vary with how species are counted, but between about 35 and more than 50 dinosaur species have been recorded. Hundreds of skeletons, many of them articulated, have been removed and exhibited in museums around the world.

Some of the most important finds are bonebeds, layers packed with the remains of many individuals. Several in the park are dominated by Centrosaurus. Researchers have interpreted some of them as herds that died together, perhaps while crossing flooded rivers, although the exact causes are still studied.

From the late 1970s, renewed work by the Provincial Museum of Alberta and later the Royal Tyrrell Museum, led by palaeontologists such as Philip J. Currie, mapped thousands of specimens and their positions in the rock. This made the park a key laboratory for studying how dinosaur communities changed over time.

Protection and the World Heritage listing

Alberta created Dinosaur Provincial Park in 1955, the province’s fiftieth anniversary year, to protect the fossil beds from casual collecting. In 1979 UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List, recognising both its fossils and the natural beauty of its badlands and riverside cottonwood woodland.

Much of the park is a natural preserve that can be entered only on guided walks and bus tours. Fossils in Alberta are protected by provincial law, and collecting without a permit is illegal.

Timeline

• c. 76.5-75 million years ago: Rivers deposit the sediments of the Dinosaur Park Formation on a coastal plain.
• c. 13,000 years ago onward: Meltwater at the end of the last ice age begins carving the Red Deer River badlands.
• 1884: Joseph Burr Tyrrell finds an Albertosaurus skull near present-day Drumheller.
• 1897-1898: Lawrence Lambe surveys fossil beds along the Red Deer River.
• 1910: Barnum Brown begins collecting along the river for the American Museum of Natural History.
• 1912: The Geological Survey of Canada hires Charles H. Sternberg and his sons.
• 1955: Dinosaur Provincial Park is established.
• 1979: UNESCO inscribes the park on the World Heritage List.

Why it matters

Dinosaur Provincial Park offers one of the clearest views of life on land shortly before the Chicxulub asteroid impact ended the age of dinosaurs. Its history also mirrors the wider story of North American palaeontology, from the Bone Wars era through the work of collectors like Barnum Brown, famous for his discovery of Tyrannosaurus rex. Today it remains an active research site where new species are still being found.