50 - 75 MILLION YEARS AGO

19th – 22nd September 2008 50 -75 MILLION YEARS AGO

I really couldn’t imagine what the Badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park were going to be like. I only speculated that the scenery would be different from anything I’d ever seen so far. Our drive there had been as expected through flat prairie farmland and cattle ranches, but as we drew closer to the boundary of the provincial park we suddenly and startlingly found ourselves in the badlands. From this initial vantage point these were not hills rising up and visible from a distance, but deep yawning holes opening up in a dry and desolate landscape, the result of years of ravaging erosion. I remember catching my breath in amazement the first moment I saw this odd looking earthscape.

Once in the park itself we found ourselves surrounded by the cliffs, and valleys called coulees, of deeply weathered ironstone-topped hillocks. They reminded me of cone-shaped layer cakes with mudstone as the middle layer and sandstone at the base. In some places all that was left of the cake was a sculpture that created a balancing rock look, known as a hoodoo. Mule deer could often be seen clambering along the rugged slopes and grazing the prairie grass.
Dinosaur Provincial Park is a World Heritage Site as designated by UNESCO and its sharp angular features forms the largest area of badlands in Canada.

The campsite is attractively situated on the banks of The Little Sandhill Creek under the shade of 25year old cottonwood trees, and adjacent to this is the 10km Public Loop Road. One can explore freely inside the perimeter of this road, and there are several marked walking trails as well. Outside of the loop road we noticed a large area that was closed off to the public. This is a natural preserve area where dinosaur palaeontologists and research students continue to work on active digs, and is accessible to the public only when on guided tours.
One of the marked self-guiding trails, The Trail of the Fossil Hunters, ends at an old quarry site, discovered during The Great Canadian Dinosaur Rush. Evidently the fever was every bit as intense as during any gold rush, with fiercely competitive palaeontologists vying for glory and the best specimens.
There is now a glassed in exhibit, an old dig that had been left in process, of enormous fossilized dinosaur bones still partly imbedded in the rock from which they had been exposed. These were the bones of a Centrosaurus, a duck billed dinosaur (hadrosaur) that lived in the Late Cretaceous Period, 50 to 75 million years ago.
This was my first visceral experience of the reality of the existence of these enormous animals living during an unimaginably distant past. To me they will never again be simply those plastic toys or rather tiresome animated talking creatures seen in numerous movies.
The Centrosaurus was a “medium” sized horned dinosaur that lived in herds of up to about 400 hundred animals. It lived before and was smaller than Triceratops.

We booked ourselves a busy Saturday with a 3hr. guided walking tour in the morning and a 2hr guided bus tour in the afternoon.
However, wanting make the most of our time here we got up early and went on a self-guided walk, the Cottonwood Flats Trail. It was on this walk that I began to get a better sense of the lush and varied riverside habitat that exists in proximity to and in harmony with the badlands.
There are 3 distinct eco-zones in this park, offering habitat to a variety of bird, animal and plant species. Prairie grasslands form only about 10% of the park’s area, “an important remnant of the native prairie ecosystem that once covered most of the vast Interior Plains stretching from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as far south as Texas.” The other 2 zones are of course the badlands and the riparian or riverbank zone.
This walk took us away from the dry and rugged coulees onto the floodplain of the wide Red Deer River. This is a narrow greenbelt that extends back a few hundred metres from the river’s edge. “Towering cottonwoods act as a canopy, creating a cool moist environment for under story species such as wild rose, saskatoon berry, chokecherry, buffaloberry and dogwood bushes”. There are an abundance of burrowing and aquatic insects, and a variety of nesting opportunities that attract over half of the parks 165 species of birds. May and June is apparently the time to come for keen bird-watchers. It also provides habitat for small mammals, coyote, beaver and porcupine, as well as the mule deer.
I was interested to learn that in this part of southern Alberta, the cottonwoods (a member of the poplar family) are at risk. They do not send out runners and will not survive being transplanted or grown from seed in a controlled environment. They will only seed themselves in wet mud in the aftermath of a flood, which happens periodically and unpredictably. The oldest trees are several hundred years old and the youngest ones are 25 years old. More recently a dam has been built a several hundred kms upstream, for, guess what, flood control and for irrigation purposes. To my mind this is very sad as it means those beautiful trees now have no way of regenerating themselves in this area, and could ultimately die out completely.

Dillon was our enthusiastic guide for the Centrosaurus Bone Bed Hike and for the Badlands Bus Tour, and took us into the Natural Preserve area. Though the information overlapped somewhat it was a most fascinating day.
Our first instruction on the hike was to stay on the trail and walk in single file. (The discipline of my convent days came in handy here!) This really emphasized for me how imperative it is to protect the very fragile, wind-swept and precious eco-system.

75 million years ago Alberta was covered by a huge subtropical ocean and coastal area. This ancient sea extended the whole length of what is now the North American Continent. It was home to sharks, crocodiles and turtles having lush vegetation similar to present day Florida. It was also home to large herds of dinosaurs. In what is now the Dinosaur Provincial Park something occurred to cause the deaths of a herd of hundreds of adults and juvenile Centrosaurus leaving behind these extraordinary fossilized bone beds that tell something of their story. One theory is that perhaps they were drowned crossing a flood-swollen river and were rapidly covered in sand and mud. As I understand it, in very simplistic terms, eons of time went by, several ice ages came and went, glaciers advanced and retreated, and lakes formed and dried up. Much more recently wind and rain eroded away the soft under layer of sandstone and worked more slowly on the mudstone, leaving behind toppings of the much harder ironstone layer. After millions of years this process has finally exposed an amazing legacy, this rich record of fossilized bones and petrified wood.

To realize that almost every rock we picked up to look at or walked on top of was part of an enormous bed of bones, the bones of reptiles that could weigh up to three thousand pounds each and that had evolved to the point where they would care for their young, was truly mind blowing.

The following day we left early to drive the couple of hours to Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell Museum, so as to get there as the doors opened. Drumheller itself is a small town with the main attraction clearly being the museum. Great dinosaurs stood at entries to gas stations, campgrounds and the like, and there were stores dotted about selling fossils.
Eric and I spent a full day, with only a short lunch break, thoroughly immersed.
It was set up in such a way that we were able to walk through the various eras, going from Precambrian to Palaeozoic to Cretaceous and so on. This was extremely helpful to me. I was able to enter into the experience of our planet’s history and acquire some understanding of the order of life’s progression through billions of years.
There were intriguing exhibits of tiny life forms such as magnified fossilized grains of pollen, of various species of prehistoric plants such as kelp, and of dinosaur footprints. Impressive dinosaur skeletons towered over us, while at eye-level there were examples of such things as ancient sea turtles and other marine fossils and prehistoric animals.
The fossils of the very large down to the very tiny was captivating.
Time in that place felt strangely beyond time, more like timeless.