Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, has the highest concentration of Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in the world. Researchers have discovered more than 44 dinosaur species here and unearthed more than 150 complete skeletons that are now on display at some of the world’s major natural history museums. These credentials earned the park a UNESCO World Heritage site designation. Given all of this, I knew I had to see it for myself.
What is Dinosaur Provincial Park like?
I stood on the rock-hard ground of Alberta’s badlands, the sun blazing down on the tall hills and hoodoos around me, looking at the striations in the layers of clay and sandstone that held the landscape’s geologic history. As starkly beautiful as the scenery was, I found my gaze locked on something right in front of me: a white bone protruding from a mound of tan sandstone, its exposed end split and weathered, its interior akin to concrete. It was a dinosaur bone—specifically from a hadrosaur, a duck-billed family of dinosaurs that lived in this region roughly 75 million years ago.
Like many children, I was obsessed with the looming dinosaur skeletons at the Museum of Natural History in New York City and with the dinosaur eggs at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. As an adult, I’ve traveled around the world to see different types of fossils.
Dinosaur Provincial Park offers a variety of guided excursions, as well as year-round self-guided trails where hikers can spot fossils and take in the scenery.
Photo by Alexandre.ROSA/Shutterstock
I’ve picked away at disjointed bones on a dig in North Dakota, marveled at the many Jurassic-era footprints in Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut, and hiked to find 280-million-year-old fossilized footprints of pre-dinosaur amphibians and reptiles at Prehistoric Trackways National Monument in New Mexico.
Dinosaur Provincial Park, however, was the first place I’d been where anyone could see dinosaur bones right out in the open, in the exact spot they’d been buried 75 million years ago. The reasons for this are a matter of geological history. Paleontologists believe that southern Alberta’s sandstone badlands were once part of a coastal ecosystem along a large inland sea that bisected North America. The area was lush with rivers, wetlands, and other ideal dinosaur habitats. After the Ice Age, glacial melting carved valleys down to the Cretaceous bedrock, and the semi-arid climate led to continual erosion, eventually unearthing fossils. This process left an unusually detailed record of ancient life out in the open.
“What sets Dinosaur Provincial Park apart from other fossil-bearing areas is just the sheer abundance of fossil material,” said Dr. Caleb Brown, curator of Dinosaur Systematics and Evolution at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, a town in Alberta’s badlands known as the dinosaur capital of the world. “It is one of the few places in the world where you can go on a hike and be pretty much guaranteed to find dinosaur bones still in the ground.”
Dinosaur Provincial Park, however, was the first place I’d been where anyone could see dinosaur bones right out in the open, in the exact spot they’d been buried 75 million years ago.
How to go fossil-hunting in Alberta’s badlands
UNESCO designated Dinosaur Provincial Park a World Heritage site because it “contains some of the most important fossil discoveries ever made.”
Photo by Mike Morrison
Guided public programs and tours (be sure to book tickets online in advance) offer access to Dinosaur Provincial Park’s most sensitive, fossil-laden areas, which are otherwise restricted to visitors. I joined a group of around 10 people, led by park interpreter and tour guide Dustin Riley, for the Bonebed Express Hike, on which we visited a bed the size of a football field, where paleontologists estimate roughly 1,000 to 3,000 creatures are buried, thanks in part to a mass fatality event.
“The leading theory right now is that Dinosaur Provincial Park was a subtropical environment right on the coast of an inland ocean,” Riley explained. “As tropical storms caused water levels to rise, the dinosaurs all went to high ground together. The water kept coming, and it’s possible a flash flood eventually swept them away.”
During the tour, Riley passed around a theropod tooth, nearly the size of my pinkie finger, from an Albertosaurus, a large apex predator. Its knife-like, serrated edges had dulled over millions of years but were still sharp enough to cut. Next, he passed around a ceratopsian horn the size of my head, which had been found in the park. Afterwards, he turned us loose to explore. Finding bones on a fossil dig often requires a mix of skill (to know what you’re looking at) and imagination (to envisage what you would have been looking at back then).
Here, however, the hunt was far easier. I spotted full bones slowly disintegrating in the sandstone walls, others flush with the ground. Yes, I’d expected to see fossils here, but I hadn’t wrapped my head around the sheer number poking out at me; in one area of the bone bed, I was dodging the bones of extinct creatures with nearly every step.
How are fossils created?
Dinosaur Provincial Park was once part of a coastal area along an inland sea; glacial melting after the Ice Age and later an arid climate would create the hoodoos and coulees found there today.
Photo by Scott Bakken/Travel Alberta
Environmental conditions have to be perfect to create a fossil, which makes the quantity in Dinosaur Provincial Park even more impressive. In order for a dinosaur’s bones to fossilize, they had to be buried quickly in mineral-rich groundwater, deep enough so that oxygen couldn’t reach it. As the body decomposed, permineralization—a chemical reaction in which the minerals from the groundwater replace the natural mineral of the bone—essentially turned it into rock and preserved it.
As it turns out, ancient Alberta was perfect for that process. The landscape had plenty of groundwater, while rivers flowing down the newly forming Rocky Mountains carried and deposited sediment to cover the dinosaurs. “There would have been a good chance for the dinosaurs living on the coastal plains to be buried,” Dr. Brown said, “and burial is an important part of fossilization.”
What to see at the Royal Tyrrell Museum
I’ve been to countless museums, but there was something different about seeing a fossil where it had been buried, rather than part of an assembled skeleton behind glass.
“We all have images of big skeletons coming out of the ground, but, relatively speaking, this is fairly rare,” Riley said. “Typically when we do find dinosaur bones, we find them as individual bones or partial skeletons.”
The Royal Tyrrell Museum operates a field station at the park, and, as Dr. Brown explained, “Much of our understanding about dinosaurs—especially Late Cretaceous dinosaurs—is due to research on fossils from Dinosaur Provincial Park.”
Opened in 1985 and expanded several times since, the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller has one of the world’s largest collections of dinosaur remains, along with many other fossils and contextual exhibits.
Photo by Brester Irina/Shutterstock
The museum is two hours northwest of the park, in Drumheller. Since its opening in 1985, it has amassed a research collection of around 160,000 fossils and geological specimens. The collection is so large that only about 1 percent of it is on display at any given time.
The exhibits paint a comprehensive picture of dinosaurs and the time they lived in, displaying treasures such as a triceratops skull, the remains of a complete gorgosaurus shown exactly as it was found, a cavernous Dinosaur Hall loaded with skeletons, interactive digital screens, and a living garden with plants that are closely related to the vegetation that thrived in Alberta in the Cretaceous period. One of the biggest attractions is the Preparation Lab, where visitors can watch paleontologists clean, study, and prep dinosaur bones.
For me, though, encountering the fossils out in the wild was what truly made them come alive. Seeing bones rise from the very spots where they’d been buried and walking the same ground where the dinosaurs lived and died offered a personal connection that helped me better imagine the enormous creatures that roamed here all those millions of years ago.
Where to stay
Tent and RV camping is allowed in Dinosaur Provincial Park through Alberta Parks. Hotel options close to the park are limited to chains in Drumheller, nearly two hours away. Calgary is also about a two-hour drive from the park, but Alberta’s largest city has several excellent hotel options, notably the Oscar Wilde–themed, one-Michelin-key the Dorian. See our guide to Calgary for more information.
