Somewhere in the ancient dust beneath your desert boot hides history’s most fearsome predator. No, you haven’t stumbled onto on the set of Jurassic Park. You’re in Alberta’s Badlands, often described as Grand Canyon-esque, smack in the middle of one of the world’s most prolific dinosaur fossil sites.
The Dinosaur Provincial Park lets you follow the trail of these mighty ancient beasts. The Red Deer River that flows through the Badlands has proved itself a treasure trove of fossil beds and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Every year, wind and rain erode another centimetre of earth, and new fossils emerge. Spend a day prospecting in one of the richest fossil sites in the world from the late Cretaceous age of dinosaurs.
The bonanza began in 1889 when Thomas C. Weston of the Geological Survey of Canada found the fossil of an Albertosaurus, a smaller cousin of the famous T-Rex. Since then, more than 400 dinosaur skeletons have been found in Dinosaur Provincial Park, representing 55 individual species. No other area of comparable size anywhere has yielded such a large number and diversity of dinosaur fossils.
Incredible prehistoric discoveries continue to be made. In 2020, a tyrannosaur discovered by amateur fossil hunters in 2010 was identified as a new species by a local Master’s student. In fact, this tyrannosaur predates Tyrannosaurus Rex by 12 million years, and is the oldest known tyrannosaur to be discovered in Canada.
Stretching 26 feet in length, the dinosaur is named Thanatotheristes Degrootorum, combining the Greek word for “reaper of death” with the last name of the DeGroots, the couple who found its fossil fragments along the shore of the Bow River. It is now housed in the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in nearby Drumheller, home to the most spectacular displays of dinosaur skeletons in the world.
Spend a day at the museum, marvel at the gigantic fossil of a fish clearly showing the fossil of another fish that had just been swallowed, make your own fossil replica, and participate in an excavation in outdoor simulated dig sites where you can uncover fossil replicas just like a real palaeontologist.
Take advantage of this chance to hike the Badlands with an experienced palaeontologist technician as your guide. Discover the natural rock formations called ‘hoodoos’ jutting out from the ground against an overwhelming, expansive skyscape. The hoodoos cast eerie shadows as their hard rock caps act like umbrellas, protecting the sandstone beneath.
Drumheller lies 90 minutes north-east of Calgary, with the Hoodoo trails found 25 kilometres south east of Drumheller on highway 10, northeast of Calgary.
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