From Alberta's Badlands Emerge Some Of World's Best Dinosaur Fossils

DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK, Alberta - As you drop from the smooth, green wheatlands of southern Alberta into the ruddy badlands of the Red Deer River valley, you plunge back in time.

Millions of years are written on the rock walls, layered by color and texture, an open book of the Earth's geologic past. Heading down toward the river that cut this jagged gash, you leave behind the domain of humanity, pass through ice ages, beyond the time of the giant mammals.

Sandstone gives way to clay, coal and siltstone - then, there it is: a thin, dark line in the rock, visible in only a few places in the world.

It is the boundary between the Tertiary and Cretaceous ages, the geologic eye-blink 65 million years ago that marks the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Then, as you hike up from the bottom of the river valley, you travel the other way in time. You walk a stream bed, moving upward through the last years of the dinosaurs' reign. Phantom traces of their life abound: bone shards, scraps of tendon embedded in rock, scatterings of fossilized dinosaur dung.

"Look, Dad - here's one!" shouted my son, waving a rock he was sure held a bit of an Edmontosaurus or Albertosaurus so common in the Red Deer Valley badlands. It turned out not to be a fossil, but no matter. His beatific smile told me he was, finally, living with the dinosaurs.

Forget "Jurassic Park," the movie, the hype. The real Jurassic Park is the High Plains of North America - not to mention Cretaceous Park and Triassic Park.

Some of the richest fossil beds on the planet lie just east of the Rocky Mountains in Montana and Alberta, as do some of the most breathtaking paleontology displays to be seen anywhere.

Our 6-year-old, Alex, has had a passionate case of dinosaur fever far too virulent to be a passing phase. Having read a bit about paleontology ourselves (to keep up our end of the conversation), we realized that one of those patented Car Tours of the West (Mount Rushmore, Little Bighorn, Wall Drug, etc.) could just as easily become a Dinosaur Tour.

The American and Canadian West are stuffed with dinosaurs, real and sublime as those in the Red Deer Valley, ridiculous and fanciful as the concrete behemoths in the city park that overlooks Rapid City, S.D.

So we sketched out a long, looping trip across the badlands of Alberta, Montana and South Dakota that would include the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta; a vast fossil dig outside of Choteau, Mont., and the Museum of the Rockies, with enough dinosaur sideshows to satisfy the most paleontologically inclined kid - or adult.

Tyrell museum

The Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology, about 180 miles east of Edmonton, was one of the high points. The museum, a $20- million gem tucked into the badlands near Drumheller, contains one of the most spectacular collections of fossils anywhere.

More than 3 million tourists have found their way to the Tyrell in the eight years it has been open - a place that, even though it may be ground zero in its richness of fossils, is almost literally in the middle of nowhere, on the way to nowhere.

Just inside the door of the 120,000-square-foot museum, pent-up, awestruck kids pulled away from their parents, leading mothers and fathers through the exhibit. They careened like pinballs from one specimen to another, authoritatively blurting out the most salient information:

"There it is - an Albertosaurus skull!" "Oooo, man - Edmontonia - and a Pachysephalosaurus skull!" "An Ankylosaurus tail club - I didn't know it was that thick!" "Stegosaurus!"

At least 35 complete fossils are arrayed in the Tyrell's vast exhibit space, some posed as they were in life, others still in the positions in which they were found - the biggest permanent display of dinosaurs anywhere in the world.

An indoor paleoconservatory houses examples of ancient plants, still thriving, that lived in Alberta during dinosaur days. Computers scattered among the exhibits allow users to classify species, recreate geologic processes, build dinosaurs on screen or decipher dinosaur trackways.

The museum is named for Joseph Tyrell, a geologist who found an Albertosaurus skull near Drumheller in 1884, the first of that species and the first example of the riches of the Alberta badlands.

Some of the Tyrell's riches are available to anyone - at a price. Fiberglass casts of specimens are constantly being made and sent to other museums and private collectors. (It's not unusual for a fossil display to be made of bones and casts, either because the actual bones are too heavy to display or because casts are needed to fill in missing bones.)

Casts cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a small dinosaur skull to $40,000 for a complete tyrannosaurus rex - one of which was bought by the producers of "Jurassic Park" - and destroyed during the movie's climax.

Hunting for fossils

Outside, amid the badlands, you quickly discover that fossil hunting is hardly a thing of the past. One day a few miles west of Drumheller, deep in rain-stripped gullies, we hiked head-down, scanning the muds and outcropped rocks, straining to separate fossils from stone. (In Alberta, you can legally pick up a fossil lying on the ground with the landowner's permission or on provincial land, but you can't dig for them.)

In less than an hour, we found fossilized wood and stones spangled with tiny leaf prints. Dinosaur tendons - which sold in local shops for less than a dollar - were layered on the stone. And the fossilized dung - technically speaking, coprolites - was abundant.

All of this was worthless in the most literal sense, but it connected those elegant displays in the museum with the here and now: We were walking among the remains of the dinosaurs' last 10 million years of life, touching them in death.

Looking on your own also grants you the appreciation of just how remarkable the major paleontological finds are - the ones occurring right now.

About 120 miles downriver from Drumheller is the source of much of its riches: Dinosaur Provincial Park, a United Nations World Heritage site, where it hasn't been unusual for the Tyrell's scientists to find as many as a half-dozen significant new specimens in a single season of digging.

The museum operates a field station in the park and conducts tours to bone beds and digs. Two fossils - a headless Lambeosaurus and an Albertosaurus - have been left in the park, displayed in situ, as they were originally found. More information Alberta tourism: phone (800) 661-8888.