Dinosaur Provincial Park

Dinosaur Provincial Park

Dinosaur Provincial Park

Dinosaur Provincial Park, public park located in the badlands of southeastern Alberta, Canada. The nearly 29-square-mile (75-square-km) park is best known for its extensive fossil beds, within which have been identified some 35 different species of dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous Epoch (about 100 to 65 million years ago). There are also fossilized remains of Cretaceous fish, reptiles, and amphibians. The area, originally created as the Steveville Dinosaur Provincial Park in 1955, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979 for its diversity of plant and animal life as well as for its paleontological value.

During the Late Cretaceous, the area of the modern park was a swampy river delta containing a dense subtropical forest of palms and giant redwoods. Over the course of time, silt deposited by the river became sedimentary rock that preserved dinosaur remains. Glaciers later carved out the badlands, exposing the fossil beds. The present-day landscape is intersected by Red Deer River and constitutes habitat considered part of an endangered riverine ecosystem. Willows and cottonwoods thrive along the river, while cacti and grasses grow in the arid badlands. Antelope and deer graze in these grassy regions, and the land also supports coyotes, rabbits, and more than 150 species of birds.

Dinosaur bones were discovered in the area as early as the 1880s, and three decades later large-scale excavations were begun by the fossil hunters Barnum Brown (1910–15) and Charles H. Sternberg (1911–17). Paleontologists have found skeletal remains in the rich fossil beds of each of the dinosaur families known to have existed in the Late Cretaceous. In 1985 the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology opened in Drumheller, 60 miles (100 km) to the northwest, to facilitate the analysis and reconstruction of the dinosaurs; one of the museum’s displays is the partial skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The Royal Tyrrell Museum also operates a field station within the park to store and catalog bones from ongoing excavations. Work in the 1990s included the excavation of a nearly complete skeleton of Albertosaurus libratus, a member of the tyrannosaur group; two significant ceratopsian bonebeds; a complete skull of Centrosaurus apertus, a horned dinosaur; several ankylosaur skulls; a skeleton of the extinct ray-fish Myledaphus; and a multigeneric deposit of more than 1,500 bones representing dinosaurs, crocodilians, amphibians, pterosaurs, and birds.