The Hunt For Canada's Great Dinosaur Graveyards | Dino Trails | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] [Music] they just love dinosaurs I think they're the most fascinating things that ever existed for me studying dinosaurs and learning about them is is like solving Mysteries every day you're very often the first person who's ever seen the fossil that you're exposing in the Badlands and this is also very exciting and I know that people get very passionate about their own Fields but I just can't imagine anybody having a better job than me [Music] thank you [Music] we know relatively little about dinosaurs and that sounds very strange to a lot of people because they know that there are so many dinosaur names out there in fact there's about a thousand species of dinosaurs that we know about right now that seems like a lot but when you look at the modern world you realize that there's over ten thousand species of living dinosaurs they're ones that we call Birds there's over four thousand species of mammals there's over six thousand species of amphibians and reptiles that's all at one time we only know of a thousand species of dinosaurs for 150 million history that spans the entire world we have so much more that we can learn about the species of dinosaurs that existed even this dinosaur was collected on the Red Deer River was found when I was stopping to take a photograph of this was in the late 1970s camera case fell off my camera and rolled down the hill and when I went down to get Hammer case the camera case had landed on the hips of this dinosaur I'm a vertebrate paleontologist and I specialize in dinosaurs and I'm one of those kids who grew up always loving dinosaurs and always knew exactly what I wanted to be and it was quite an unbelievable story in the sense that I managed to get a job doing exactly what I wanted to do and exactly the place I wanted to be Alberta because Alberta is one of the very best places in the world for dinosaurs in Alberta we've found so far about a hundred species of dinosaurs and that includes more than 40 species out of Dinosaur Provincial Park alone and this is one of the richest ecosystems known for dinosaurs those dinosaurs include many of the most famous dinosaurs animals like corythosaurus the helmeted lizard Parasaurolophus the one with the long tubular Crest on the back of its skull centrosaurus chasmosaurus Triceratops Tyrannosaurus Rex Gorgosaurus Albertosaurus and kylosaurus these are some of the major dinosaurs that everybody seems to know as names and their dinosaurs from Alberta I've been very lucky in that my wife Eva is a person who's also a paleontologist her specialty though is is fossil plants not dinosaurs [Music] it's like being a detective to try and find out what was in the in this ancient environment generally speaking hello botany and palinolities and underrated science because it doesn't appear to be as exciting as dinosaurs and crocodiles but the fact is that it is as important because if it wasn't for the plants there would have been no dinosaurs we have about 20 centrosaurus bomb beds in the park I have a wonderful job officially I'm a professor at the University of Alberta but I'm also a curator of the dinosaur collections at the University and I do a lot of teaching I of course train graduate students people who want to become paleontologists themselves but the fun part really is getting out in the Badlands and looking for dinosaurs then you will love history our extensive library of documentary features everything from the ancient origins of our earliest ancestors to the daring mission to sink the Bismuth history hit has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and timeline fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code timeline at checkout Dr Phillip J Curry is my professor at the University of Alberta he's also my graduate supervisor and Phil is a living legend he is a generalist one of the few dinosaur generalists that's still around by that I mean he doesn't just study one kind of dinosaur he doesn't just study one aspect of dinosaurs he studies everything he's worked on horn dinosaurs he's worked on Duck bills of course he's worked on Tyrannosaurus he's worked here in Alberta into Mongolia he's responsible for for finding some of the very very first feather dinosaurs and describing them I found this bone here in the first thought it was a vertebra but when Phil he pulled it out it turned out to be the occipital condyle from a center saw Dr Eva couple house is also one of my professors at the U of A Eva is wonderful she is sometimes given the nickname of Quarry mom and she's the one that looks after us out here in the field he said be careful and then he's running down the hill we take our students out to Dinosaur Provincial Park to train them in the field techniques what dinosaur bone looks like in the field what's important what's worth collecting and then how you go about collecting it how you dig it out of the ground how you bring it back safely [Music] [Music] Dinosaur Provincial Park is really special because of the fact that it has so many dinosaurs in it almost five percent of the world's known species of dinosaurs come from Dinosaur Provincial Park and when you consider the dinosaurs had a history of more than 150 million years and that they they're known from every continent in the world to realize that five percent of all known species of dinosaurs come from this one single place in the world that's that's pretty amazing well had her sore teeth turtle shells Croc scoot historically there's been a Great Divide between where dinosaurs are studied and where they're actually dug up most of the major universities and museums have always been on the East Coast University of Alberta is really changing that we're a major research institution that's located at a place where we can find dinosaur bones in our backyard and that's allowed us to really explode we've produced a huge amount of research in just the last few years and I really think the University of Alberta is going to be a Shining Light in paleontology it's going to be leading the field for many years to come we spend part of the summer collecting things and then the winter time and the early spring preparing them stabilizing them getting them ready for research so the diner lab is really the place where we bring all the fossils from wherever we collect them it's where I've really been able to put my time and effort into getting to know the science better and being able to do the research Specialties that I'm really interested in would be feather Evolution the evolution of dinosaurs into birds and how that all kind of played out over the millions of years that it took what I'm working on at the moment is the skull of soreness alestes I just removed it from the body a few days ago and the idea is to prepare it out three-dimensionally our students are making a big difference in paleontology we're publishing a lot of papers every year that push forward the the edge of the Sciences the lab's important too because it gives students an opportunity to come and work on it could be potentially specimens they found themselves or specimens that they're interested in doing research on so it's really good for people to be able to come and do some Hands-On work so my work on dinosaur Locomotion focuses on understanding how dinosaurs were able to walk and run and in particular I actually look at dinosaur tails and the tales of dinosaurs are really really important for understanding their motion when I first actually arrived at the University of Alberta I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to work on so I spent a lot of time reading papers and looking at popular media of dinosaurs and trying to get ideas and I came across a picture book about ankylosaurs using their tails and it occurred to me that nobody had really looked at how or why or whether or not they could even swing their tails as weapons so some of the things that I've already found out are how they could use them how hard they could swing them whether they could withstand very like hard strikes against predators some of the things I'd like to understand now are really how and why these structures evolved how weird things evolve in the fossil record so I'm on my way to the Royal Ontario Museum to start a postdoctoral research appointment so that's a two-year research appointment and the next things that I'm going to be looking at are understanding the biogeography of dinosaur groups like ankylosaurs but also other dinosaur groups paleontology is a very very competitive field generally speaking there are two career paths a paleontologists can take you can either get on as a curator at a museum or you can become a professor at the University frankly I would be very happy doing either one more than ever before people are doing research on dinosaurs in novel ways and these research approaches are only possible because of the fact that we have so many people looking at dinosaurs on finer and finer scales so we will continue I hope to have more people employed in paleontology at the moment there's about 125 people worldwide who are paid to do research on dinosaurs when you compare that to other professions 125 for the entire world just isn't that much but it's the best it's ever been I just hope that the trend continues and we see even more people doing research on dinosaurs because we have so much more we can learn foreign [Music] fossil hunting is for everyone not just little kids although little kids certainly have the enthusiasm but I'm 60 years old and I'm still thrilled about going hunting for dinosaurs so anybody can be a dinosaur hunter foreign [Music] when I go out I usually go for day trips I usually go early in the morning so that it's cool when I'm walking into the area where I want to Fossil hunt and then I spend the entire day there prospecting and then I walk out in the evening when it's a little cooler in Alberta you have to surface collect only you cannot dig anything up and you can only surface collect on public land or land where you've gotten permission from the landowners to collect it the more and more you're out the better you get at spotting things that are fossilized items in the Badlands because there's an awful lot of rocks in the Badlands and so not every rock is going to be a fossil and so it's just a matter of training your eye I guess you would say to look for certain things and certain colors because dinosaur bones usually are a different color than the Rocks around them I have a collection that consists of dinosaur teeth and dinosaur claws I've got an ammonite all of these items have been collected in the Badlands in Alberta as a fossil collector or fossil hunter in the province of Alberta I am simply a custodian of these fossils the Alberta Government owns the fossils so I'm just being a caretaker of these fossils in my collection Bill Bloss is a nice gentleman from Calgary he's had a passion for dinosaurs since he was a very young man and now that he's retired he's got some free time and decided to go fossil hunting so in the course of one of his adventures in 2015 he stumbled upon the remains of what looked like an articulated leg of a meat-eating dinosaur articulated means that all the bones are connected the way they were in life that got us really excited reported to find and I took him along with a crew this summer we went and retrieved the specimen and turned out to be an articulated skeleton of a young Tyrannosaur so that ended up being a very significant Discovery and we hope that there's going to be more surprises that will come out of that find foreign fossils I'd say every year we get at least a hundred reports of discoveries made by their general public people definitely know that if they find something significant to report Their fines because we never know where the next big Discovery will be made there's so many potential sites in the province that paleontologists like me can't go everywhere we can't be everywhere in the province even though we'd love to be but it's impossible so that's why we rely a lot on the General Public finding a fossil is a fantastic experience because as soon as you see it in my case I know exactly what it is and just realizing that this animal has lived 60 to 70 million years ago and I'm the first one that's put my eyes on this particular bone or fossil is quite an exhilarating feeling and when you find something that the museum thinks is important that's even better the Royal Terrell museum is incredibly important from the point of view that we specialize in Western Canadian dinosaurs so we are one of the primary museums in the world that gathers abundant information about dinosaurs and dinosaur fossils from a very productive part of the world in terms of dinosaurs one of the really interesting aspects about the history of the museum although it was built and the doors opened in 1985 not that long ago just a little over 30 years the towns people of Drumheller were pushing the Alberta Government to build a dinosaur facility a museum of some sort here going right back into the 1940s so for about 40 years there was a lobbying effort to build this facility in a sense we can actually say that the people of Drumheller were a little bit ahead of the government in terms of seeing the opportunity for tourism seeing perhaps the opportunity for even science to build a facility like this it's fantastic working at the Royal Trail Museum you really get to see paleontology at the Forefront being a dedicated paleontology Museum we get to have a large group of people who are out in the field collecting fossil material and often the preparators are the first people that see this material so often we're the first person or the first person ever to touch this material or it's the first time this material has seen the light of day in 65 or 75 million years and that's really special and also getting to see the researchers working on cutting edge paleontology you get to see new species being described and you get to work on that material which is really neat in the lab I'm currently working on a couple of bone bed specimens that is material from some local sites for disarticulated dinosaur material on those right now I'm working on doing some air scribing air scribing is using a Pneumatic tool kind of like a little Jackhammer and we use it to remove the Matrix from the surface of the bone so often when we have really hard Matrix we're trying to remove the material but we need to use something a little bit stronger than a hand tool so that's when an air scribe would come into it at the moment we have two fantastic dinosaur specimens that are being worked on in the large preparation lab one of those we've nicknamed the Sun Core notosaur that is an armored dinosaur that essentially is a mummified dinosaur it is preserved with not just the bones in their original position but also with the skin impressions of the dinosaur intact so it essentially looks like a sleeping dinosaur and also the fort McLeod lovedoceratops it was collected after the 2013 flooding it is absolutely phenomenal it is a three-dimensionally preserved articulated small dinosaur it's about the size of a dog we have a portion of the skull but the rest of the body is completely intact it just looks like it lay down to sleep and never woke up and we have that preserved foreign I am a researcher at the Royal Trail Museum of paleontology and right now we're in Dinosaur Provincial Park Alberta which is one of the best places in the world to find dinosaur bones and what we're doing right now is what's called field work and that means we're going out we're finding new sites finding new specimens and we're collecting those for the museum for both research and for display so the site that we're working today is a hadrosaur or a duckbill dinosaur it was found two years ago by students on a field trip from Queen Mary University of London and they found the skull eroding out of the hill so the museum decided it was a good opportunity to collect that skull because that's where most of the information about the animal is most of the really important stuff is in the skull this bone right here is part of the cheekbone this is part of the crest and then we have the brain case and some of the lower Jaws coming out on this side once we started collecting that we realized most of the skeleton was there so we're collecting the skeleton as well apparently we're in the excavation stage of this dinosaur collection what that means is that we're currently uncovering all the bones so they're contained in a rock we're removing that rock getting down to the surface of the bone but we don't uncover all of the bone we only uncover enough to tell what type of bone it is and what type of dinosaur it comes from and then once that's done we actually do some mapping because it's actually really important especially in this Quarry how the bones are lying so what orientation they are how far they are from other bones and in this particular case at what angle they're laying most often we find bones laying flat but in this particular case most of the big bones are laying like that which actually gives us some hints as to how this animal was deposited back in the Cretaceous once we've mapped out those particular bones we put lots of glue on it to consolidate everything and then we do what's called a plaster jacket and this is basically a way that we figured out how to transport the specimen from the ground back to the museum so we have to make sure that this undercuts and I stay there when it's setting up a bit more it might be a bit tight the future of paleontology is an ongoing interface between the field work and new technologies so it's actually mixing the very low Tech of a pickaxe which hasn't changed in 200 years and some of the fancy technology which is brand new each year and I think the exciting discoveries are going to be made at that interface between those two areas [Music] my life has been a whirlwind of traveling and doing what I love I dig in the dirt for a living and I walk around and I hike and hike and hike I love it [Music] how I find fossils it's like they got a sign on them and says pick me pick me no just kidding my eyes observe things differently you know I'll see something that stands out and sixth sense I'll look the right way you know it's impossible to describe how I do it I just it happens Wendy is an advocational paleontologist she's got a very sharp eye for finding fossils Wendy's got a very good eye because well she would claim it because she's short and I think it's just it's an intuitive innate ability to recognize interesting shapes and colors when she's walking around that are different than the rocks that surround them she grew up in the Warner area and since the time that she could walk she was out walking the Badlands Gathering up scraps of fossils and showing the paleontologists she was instrumental in finding the devil's Cooley nesting site back in 1987 a young local girl named Wendy sloboda was hiking through the Milk River Ridge when she came across what she thought was dinosaur eggshell Franklin now she had spent some time in the Royal Tyrell Museum of paleontology up in Drumheller so she knew a little bit about what she was looking for now she sent this eggshell fragment up to Dr Len Hills at the University of Calgary who confirmed it and sent it to Dr Philip Curry in the Royal Tyrone Museum they then sent a team down to investigate the ridge the team actually managed to find some of these eggs and being the first nesting site in all of Canada it caused quite enough Roar and it was absolutely incredible Devil's Coulee dinosaur excite is so significant because we found dinosaur eggs there but also was found dinosaur embryos babies still inside the eggs and it was the first in Canada there was also eggs found in Montana but they were hatchlings these guys were still actually inside the eggs [Music] Devil's dinosaur and heritage museum is located down in Warner Alberta it's a fairly small town but the museum itself is dedicated to the first dinosaur nesting site ever found in Canada this is one of the dinosaur egg nests that was collected in Devil's Coulee they actually laid them in pairs it's a very important site and even though the museum itself is small we make up for our size with full guided interpretive tours so we are going to be doing something called surface collecting where we're going to take a look around and we're going to pick up microfossils examine them and then we're going to put them right back where we found them when we take people out there they get to experience what it would be like to be a paleontologist going out into the field we examine fossils that have just barely touched the surface oh a little piece of tooth oh that's a nice one too the kids get the chance to learn about how these dinosaurs lived what they did and how they acted in the world the devil's dinosaur egg site it's a special place for me because it kind of set my life on a path and it led me into dinosaurs and that's what I've done since 1987 and it's been a quite an exciting life [Music] I'm a professional photographer my biggest thing is I do high Action Sports Photography like motorcycle racing I've shot PBR I've shot Red Bull events basically the more exciting and dangerous it is I like to do it [Music] looking for dinosaurs and photography tie in really well especially Wildlife photography which I love to do because I take my camera and go look for dinosaurs and take pictures of birds and deer and Elk [Music] the Southern Alberta area here has a lot of dinosaurs but when everybody thinks of dinosaurs they think of Dinosaur Provincial park or the Drumheller Valley which in my opinion is kind of good because it keeps people away from here and they don't want to flood to try and find dinosaurs people like to collect dinosaurs and pick up dinosaur bones if they don't know where they're at they can't foreign Alberta Dinosaur Project sad P it looks like a pubis of a small address or it's not not part of our our guy I don't think Dr Michael Ryan and Dr David Evans are two very good friends of mine I've worked with them a lot and I think it's a great project they're doing a lot of good stuff yep I bet you the head is just tucked right there they would have us curve back be about that long the neck the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project is a multi-year collaborative research project between myself at the Royal Ontario Museum and my colleague Dr Michael Ryan at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in association with colleagues here at the Royal Trail Museum the University of Alberta and other institutions and our goal is to study some pretty remote areas of Southern Alberta like here along the Milk River Valley fill in gaps in our knowledge of the dinosaur fossil record of Alberta to better understand how dinosaurs are revolving and changing leading up to that end Cretaceous mass extinction this looks like a actually like it might be two bones that looks dinosaurs actually are important for understanding what's going on in our modern world today the work that we're doing here doesn't help us save individual species or individual animals today but it puts the scale of how we're affecting our environment and our world and our Global ecosystem today in an important historical perspective and when you look at the rates of Extinction that we're experiencing today they are approaching the rates that we see in these big five mass extinction events including the 166 million years ago that resulted in the collapse that wiped out the big dinosaurs and so dinosaurs in their world are extremely important for understanding how the world will be affected by mass extinction in our case human cause mass extinction a lot of our big finds here in Southern Alberta are owed to Wendy sloboda she is one of the very best fossil Hunters anywhere in the world she has over 3 000 fossils to her name and the collections of the royal Trail Museum and she is definitely found most of our good specimens we actually joke that we're Wendy's Cleanup Crew out here and that's because she runs around and finds great stuff and then fortunately for us we have to go and dig up these great specimens the story of Wendy ceratops is is like many for Wendy slabode I mean she found this amazing site we came and dug it up and it happened to be a brand new and important species of dinosaur and so we thought it was about time to to name one after her in recognition of her amazing talent and contributions to Alberta paleontology and so that's where the name Wendy ceratops comes from I for a tattoo of my dinosaur if they ever named one after me well they obliged me and named this dinosaur after me and they called it Wendy ceratops pinhornensis and it's a ceratopsian and it has a very unique frill and it's got spikes that droop forward they said they compare it to my dreads it's on display at the Royal Ontario Museum right now it's pretty neat I got to go out and see it in January mounted and everything it's pretty cool little dinosaur we actually made an exhibit around the discovery of Wendy ceratops and how scientists go about identifying new species in the fossil record so we actually have a full-scale reconstruction of Wendy ceratops we actually have the first bone that Wendy found in the ground and we have some of the key original fossils that highlight that incredible story to have a dinosaur named after you is one of the biggest Honors that anybody in paleontology can have I was pretty excited and still today when I hear them say Wendy ceratops is just like shake my head it's still kind of weird to hear it and to know that that's my dinosaur My Hope for the future of paleontology is that it continues to grow we have so much more to discover and I think the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project shows that you can get a lot out of an area like Alberta that many people would think is you know has been basically played out and there are so many places like this all over the world that paleontologists have barely scratched the surface on and I'd like to see a bigger Next Generation Explore More areas and find out more things fill in those gaps and give us a better understanding of the history of life on Earth dinosaurs have kept me active it's helping me stay younger and and every year I want to go out and find more and more and more and more and it's fun I enjoy it it's good for my health it's rewarding it's it's just everything 20 years from now hopefully I'll be looking for dinosaurs still [Music] please when I see the dinosaur tracks here at Grand cash I'm completely in awe they are the most magnificent fossil locality that I've ever seen it's just so dramatic when you see it when the Sun hits them just right the footprints just jump out at you and it's it's awe-inspiring to see them the tracks the setting even the town of grand cash it's one of my favorite places to come and see and I would certainly recommend that anybody who has the opportunity should come and see the tracks for themselves foreign [Music] cash dinosaur track site is located about 20 kilometers north of the town of grand cash about an hour and a half south of Grand Prairie they're located in the middle of coal mine that's currently being mined by a grand cash Coal Company [Music] tracks in this area are 100 million years old they're from the middle Cretaceous Albion the stage of the Cretaceous when they were formed they were at sea level there used to be an ocean to the East and to the Northeast as well so it would have been a much different climate than it was today very warm the first tracks were found in this mine back in the in the late 80s and that was by a combination of visiting geologists and also some of the people that worked for the coal mine they notified the Terrell Museum and Terrell sent a couple Expeditions up to do initial survey work then I took it on as a master's project and through the whole time I've had fantastic access it's been a great place to study and learn about fossil dinosaurs and other vertebrates because it's all here there's thousands and thousands of footprints and there's all kinds of different preservations lots of different behaviors and since there's 25 different sites in the mine many of them represent different types of environments so you get to see that certain animals had environmental preferences or tolerances and there's certain environments that other animals tended to avoid we came into the mine yesterday and spotted this this slab here which has a lot of little avian Footprints so little Footprints of birds this site has a pretty big diversity of track types and animals that made the tracks includes large theropod dinosaurs probably some type of an ALICE sword not Allosaurus itself but at one of its descendants there's also at least three types of medium-sized dinosaurs and we're not sure of the identity of those there's one type of small meat-eating dinosaur as well a small theropod that was likely because of the long Paces in stride it was the speed demon we also have probably five or six types of avian tracks including tracks of small Shorebirds and also larger wading birds that would have resembled cranes and finally we have crocodilian swim tracks tracks right at the base here that you can see felt like this one here is a as an ankylosaur foot and hand print so it's a quadrupedal dinosaur so there's the heel and there's one of the digits one of the outer digits and another digit and another digit there's probably a fourth one in here these dinosaur tracks here at Grand cash were found directly as a result of the mining by Smokey River coal and to some extent Grand cash coal as well and there are other Industries oil and gas oil sands that are also turning up fossils not necessarily dinosaur tracks but they are finding fossils as well the big thing is they're finding these fossils they're bringing them to our attention so they're not just being lost or tucked away somewhere in a mine somewhere never to be seen by science they're finding them and they're calling us [Music] we have lots of meat eaters we have some plant eaters we have Birds we have Crocs let's go take a look at the tracks because that's what you came here for over the next two days I'm going to be leading a couple of Tours and what the tours are designed to do is to get a bit of an interest in having some sort of Tourism interpretive facility or program established at these sites as each one erodes it exposes the next layer of tracks these sites are one of Canada's best kept secrets and it's actually would do them just as to have more people see and appreciate them can you guys see this okay that's a left footprint of an ankylosaur the hand prints right here this is the right footprint hand print left right left right all the way across it's a opportunity to diversify and open up these uh these sites to the public Grand cash coal is is not opposed to opening these sites I mean it's not our land to begin with we're just temporarily borrowing it and if we can fit that into a Reclamation plan and a Reclamation strategy is a long-term end goal I think it's a win-win for both us and the public the density for footprints on this layer is about 100 per square meter so the square meter by meter 100 tracks so this is a very densely populated surface this attraction here is going to be very welcome to the economy of grand cash present time the economy is not that great here in Grand cash with mine shutting down and problems in the forest industry it could be a lifesaver for the town of grand cash I see it as somewhere where people can stop and take a break in the middle of their day as they're traveling they can stop and have lunch in the downtown they can take a bus come on up and see the dino tracks and just have little kids use their imagination on what they can see up here foreign [Music] there is an avian trackway a bird trackway that is right in line with that theropod trackway that's coming down it's an interesting trackway because it's walking like a bird so it's making short paces and strides so and very toad in very pigeon-toed that's how the trackway starts it's going you know right left right very short pace and stride as the track wave progresses the pace of stride increase and the footprints straighten out and then it ends so what do you think might have happened our flew away I think the people will come here to see these tracks in conjunction with the Dinosaur Museum that's already operational at Wembley it's not that far away and the attraction appears to be to the younger generation they're in love with dinosaurs and anything associated with Dinosaurs the Philip J Curry Dinosaur Museum in the Grand Prairie region is something that opened in 2015. people think that I have a lot to do with that museum well I don't I mean it's something that was named in honor of me because I've done a lot of work in the Grand Prairie region looking for dinosaurian resources the idea of building a museum though goes back a long way it was already in the 1970s that people started talking about the fact that Grand Prairie needed some more local Museum that was going to display dinosaurs found in that region of the province and basically it represents not just the Grand Prairie region but the whole of Northwestern Alberta the museum offers technological tools that allow people to engage with the exhibits in a way that a lot of museums don't offer so a lot of virtual reality viewers to bring creatures back to life from the Cretaceous there are microscopes they can look at tiny fossils and understand ecological systems that are long gone they can can interact with CT scanning devices that allow them to look inside a dinosaur's head there's lots of things like that [Music] when visitors come to the Philipp Bakery dinosaur museum during the summer we offer tours out to the Five Stone Creek site so visitors can can come and go on a guided hike through the campground and to the site itself talking about the paleontology of the region and being able to see The Bone Bed and if you're very lucky if it happens to be during one of our field stints where we're actually working the site we may be at the The Bone Bed itself [Music] we have worked for a long time in the Grand Prairie area on one particular bone Bay it was found by a school teacher in the mid-1970s this turned out to be a bone bed that is a place where you get many many individual animals that are buried in the same place in this particular case The Bone Bed represented a mass death of a herd of horned dinosaurs and the horned dinosaur is called Pachyrhinosaurus so far we've excavated the skulls of more than 25 specimens out of that one bone bed but it's also one of the richest bone beds I know of anywhere in the world for dinosaurs we were getting up to 300 bones per cubic meter out of that bone bed and The Bone Bed stretches for more than 400 meters that we know of so we've got work to do for probably another 100 years there in terms of Excavating that bone bed and finding new information about pachy rhinosaurus we still haven't figured out why the animals are all there what caused this Mass death and so on so we continue to excavate that bone bed looking for new evidence [Music] Alberta is known worldwide as one of the richest sources of dinosaur fossils anywhere perhaps people take it a bit for granted because the faunas are relatively well known people have been doing field work in Alberta for a long time and I think with the field work we're doing in the Grand Prairie area that will hopefully open up another part of Alberta's fossil record to International attention and show people that there's yet another side to Alberta's fossil richness Grand Prairie is relatively a newer area in terms of paleontology in Alberta there has been work done there in the past but it's been fairly limited and one of the reasons for that is because there's very little exposure of the rock up there most of the landscape is covered in crops and forests fields that kind of thing so it's difficult to prospect up there there's less areas that you can get too easily to look for fossils however when we do go to those areas and search the Rocks we find fossils there and we find a lot of fossils there in Grand Prairie we know that there are two very common dinosaurs um a ceratopsian called Pachyrhinosaurus and a hadrosaur called Edmontosaurus so we expect to find more of those and that would be interesting but I think the more scientifically significant possibility is finding additional animals and we have bits and pieces of them we know that there are several theropods for example meat-eating dinosaurs in that area because we find teeth and other fragments that show they're there we know that Beyond dinosaurs there are turtles and these crocodile like animals called Champs of sores and there's every reason to expect that we'll find members of other dinosaur groups potentially Wizards potentially crocodilians so we just need to get out there and find more sites and get to know this Cretaceous fauna better and simply what was going on in the Grand Prairie area during the late Cretaceous [Music] thank you if there's one thing our planet desperately needs is people to be able to connect with their natural world and their Heritage and we try and do that with everything we do here in Tunbridge Timber Ridge is a beautiful remote little community of just 3 000 people in northeastern British Columbia it's British Columbia's youngest therefore newest Community it was created out of nothing in the early 1980s entirely because of the metallurgical coal that occurs here and we've been through huge ups and downs with coal mines coming and closing and coming and closing we've got a fairly big UNESCO Global geopuck it's about 8 000 square kilometers and there are two arms that have allowed us to get this cover to designation the one is 100 kilometers of hiking trails that go to these beautiful geological sites all with the geological story to tell and the other one is the Timber Ridge Museum foundation with the peace region paleontology Research Center with all the dinosaur and other fossil Heritage which we have discovered here Ridge we have the dinosaur discovery Gallery this is where we showcase all of the great fossils that we've collected in the peace region and we also have examples of tumblridge's favorite the inkylosaur the armored dinosaur we have several Footprints of that out on display and we also have on display a very small sample from our Tyrannosaur trackway it's the world's only Tyrannosaur trackway and we have just enough room to fit one of the footprints into one of the cabinets for people to see and it is a massive footprint I got involved with uh Tumbler Ridge as a result of two boys finding a trackway that led to the discovery of dinosaur excavation site the first dinosaur bones in British Columbia that's how we built the museums because of those bones everyone was predicting Ghost Town status for us it was such a serendipitous Discovery and as a dad I just realized you know maybe the kids have got an opportunity to do something cool here the public component of the museum is the tip of the iceberg so the the collections is really massive it is the only type of collection of its kind in the province of British Columbia [Music] so where we're standing right now is the collections facility for the peace region paleontology Research Center so this is the fossil archives for the area so all of the fossils that we go out into the field and we collect we bring them back here and we clean them up and then we do all of the studies on them and this is where they get stored I want people to look at paleontology and fossils specifically and not just say oh it's just some dusty old bone on a shelf I want them to be in awe of this millions of years old specimen that they're looking at and go wow that is part of our past this is part of my story I want people to get more connected with paleontology I think with paleontology in tumblridge we have now reached a critical mess in the early days our future was not by any means secure but I think our reputation has grown and spread to such a degree that we can now speculate you know where are we going to be we need to be internationally recognized we've got a dinosaur bone bed which we cannot excavate without funding currently we know there are at least four dinosaurs there we've got six thigh bones but with some funding there might be 100 200 300 dinosaurs right there the only Tyrannosaur trackways in the world they lead into a small Cliff with the backhoe and a bobcat if you could get those there with funding take off the overburden can you imagine Tyrannosaur trackways that just go on and on and on what an international draw card that would be I know that what we're doing here is not just provincially or nationally important but it's internationally significant stuff and Heritage is critical foreign ly working on is near Hudson's Hope just south of the Williston Reservoir it was discovered in 2008 by a local person named Barry Moreau as we rode by on the quad we noticed this exposed slab of Rock with strange depressions in it that that seemed to be indicating a pattern of footsteps when we jumped off the quad and walked over and looked is when we really discovered that yes they were dinosaur tracks these Footprints are 115 million years old so we're dealing with early Cretaceous dinosaurs we're in the beginning stages but we've already found about nine or ten different track types so we have the footprints of large medium small theropods those are the meat-eating dinosaurs we have a few size ranges of plant-eating dinosaurs the ornessopods and we have at least one sauropod trackway and we may have possibly the traces of things like birds and maybe some other smaller animals like that the plan this year is to excavate as much of the 6 000 square meter area as possible the very first thing that we do is we have to clean off the site we have to get all of the extra crud off of the surface step two is once we've uncovered the surface is to give it the big brush off so we sweep all of the debris off of the surface so that we have a nice clean slate to work with they all weren't on the surface at the same time we can tell that because of the differences in preservation so it wasn't one big dinosaur Stampede but just a fairly dense amount of trackways being built up just a number of dinosaurs walking across and then some more walking across a little later and then some after that now that's the type of thing that we're gonna we're gonna be looking at and seeing if we can determine what the sequence was like which ones came first which ones came second which directions they were going in was a particular group of dinosaurs did they have a preferred sort of orientation were they heading somewhere specific or is it all random [Music] for the past week we've had visitors from many different parts of the world these are all people who are interested in various aspects of dinosaur footprints and especially early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints so we form an international dinosaur footprint team so we're working on various aspects of the site I thought when we got here we'd see one or two or three or four Footprints and then we'd be you know I think this is great we're up to 800 Footprints already and in the last week we've exposed you know I think a few hundred ourselves this is authentic dinosaur action I'm totally blown away I didn't think I'd ever see anything like this and just the diversity of different animals that are here the different types [Music] hey guys I got two on Earth Parts here that kind of um turn in unison somebody once said that tussle Footprints are the nearest thing we have to movies of dinosaurs and I like to tease my friends who study bones and say you're studying death destruction Decay putrefaction we're studying that living Dynamic athletic animal this one comes down here I thought that was a theropod at first but it's not and then it's here here here the three-dimensional data set that I'll produce from the work I do here at this track site can be thought of kind of as a base layer and from that we can look at which animal walk across the surface first we can look at how the footprints are connected into trackways from making those measurements we can estimate how fast the animals were going one of the standard things we say about Footprints is that they represent the animals that actually came into this area sometimes if you find a dinosaur skeleton it may have been washed hundreds of miles down a river it may have been scavenged and transported around you don't know how representative it is [Music] on July 8th we had an unveiling of the dinosaur track site and this was to raise awareness of paleontology resources that are in the peace region and specifically this site thank you to everybody for for coming and we're going to be working on this site probably until mid to late August so anybody that feels like coming out and just checking out the site or working with us you're more than welcome we have this wonderful opportunity not just for paleontology Heritage protection but also to combine that with tourism because this is one of the few sites that people can actually visit that shows a whole lot of dinosaur footprints on one surface we've had this area exposed this was area where the tracks are first found and of course we're saying that we want to expose all the way up to the trees but you know when we bring people here they're like well how do you know there's trucks up there so we excavated a little area and now we have the proof so let's go take a look Exploration with this current track site that we're working on we're not discouraging the public from visiting it's not something that we're advertising but we're quite happy to show them around and it's nice to see how enthusiastic they are about what's out here invertebrates often put most of their carrying most of their weight on the inside on their InStep what we'd love to have happen for this surface is for a lovely building to be put over it a nice interpretive Center and to have the tracks story told to have wonderful displays inside and be able to share this site with everyone who comes to the area it's fascinating because these are animals that just aren't here anymore but they left such a huge impact on our planet and they were just like any other animal that was around today all the Cougars and the moose and the Bears and interacting with their environment and leading their lives and having their impacts and just being able to tell their story and be part of preserving them and making that story available to the public it's humbling and a great honor all at the same time My Hope for the future is that I'll get to see a number of museums in British Columbia built that have more of a paleontological focus and that this interest in paleontology becomes ingrained in the Society of all British Columbians that there's an awareness that there isn't now [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 105,655

Keywords: Timeline World History, Timeline, Full Length Documentary, History Documentary, World History, learn history, history facts

Id: z9pWF3oysS8

Length: 54min 15sec (3255 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023