Dinosaur Bones Alberta Badlands Abound In Relics From Another Age

The trailhead sign reads, “Caution: Beware of rattlesnakes, scorpions and black widow spiders.”

Today’s hike in Dinosaur Provincial Park of southern Alberta’s Badlands may be the second biggest mistake of our family vacation. Our first mistake proves to be a lack of planning.

We reread the sign posted next to the park’s Royal Tyrrell Museum Field Station, 29 miles (48 kilometers) north of Brooks, Alberta. I lace up hiking boots and gob bug repellent on top of sunscreen. My husband, two children and I warily tread the 0.9-kilometer Coulee Viewpoint Trail past unseen prairie bullies with venomous sidearms. This is nature’s equivalent of downtown Detroit after midnight.

A hot breeze ruffles a tenacious tuft of prairie grass called Indian rice, which manages to survive in this Gobi-dry corner of Alberta. We listen for the unmistakable titter of a prairie rattler, the keeper of ancient secrets here at this dinosaur graveyard.

In this heat, somewhere above 90 degrees, says a fellow bone hunter, even the rattlesnakes know to stay in the shade. I’m not convinced.

Sweet sage perfumes the breeze. We find steps carved into the sandstone by the 80,000 humans who visit annually. At this temperature, making the 30-foot ascent is like using a StairMaster from hell.

Raccoons, magpies, cottontails, marmots and mule deer roam the dry, cracked land, where eons ago primitive horses and rhinos grazed a lush wetland.

From the trail’s high point at the northern edge of the Badlands, we see a sculpted golden landscape of erosional features called pipes and tunnels that spreads below us over 18,000 acres.

In start contrast, a campground sits in green cottonwoods, squeezed between the Red Deer River and the Badlands. It’s a bone’s throw from the Field Station. There’s an amphitheater, picnic area, canoe launch, shower and concession stand.

But no people. I wonder if the rattlesnakes, scorpions and black widow spiders pare down the number of campers on a nightly basis.

Our initial hike ends without seeing any dinosaur bones. Upon returning to the Royal Tyrrell Museum Field Station, we see live tourists. They board a bus headed into the natural preserve for a guided bone-bed tour.

Reservations are necessary, we discover. The only tickets left are from no-shows. I say to my husband, they’re probably wrestling with rattlers.

About $15 lighter, we board the bus and soon arrive at one of many bone beds in the natural preserve. Kids bounce from one large carnivore’s tomb to another.

“It’s so heavy!” says a kid lifting a leg bone. “Mommy, can we take this home?” I prepare myself for an onslaught of “Pleeeeeazes.”

Thankfully, the guide on this two-hour fossil safari gently tells him that the bones have been here for eons because no one has removed them.

“In Canada, there is a $50,000 fine for removing fossils,” he says, turning to the adults. “And up to two years in jail.”

At the word “jail,” several kids replace the two-pound bones and skitter to the next dinosaur disaster victim.

In a cataclysmic meltdown 75 million years ago, hundreds of dinosaurs from 35 different species died in their tracks. Scientists piece together a flood of such massive proportion that even plants died - nearly 300 species fossilized here - when waters doused life from the once semitropical area. The badlands, grasslands and Red Deer River contain one of the richest fossil beds in the world.

We find fossilized vertebrae in 1-by-1-inch chunks - heavier than they look and the color of the Red Deer River. It’s a difficult search, not because of the distraction of rattlesnakes, scorpions and spiders which never materialize, but because many large dinosaur bones are scattered like Legos on my son’s bedroom floor. Without careful boot placement, we are walking on bones.

“There are so many bones here,” says Elaine Kratz of Collingwood, Ontario, “that I’m beginning to get complacent about all of it.”

Her sons, Shane and Gavin find part of a soft-shell turtle, a triumph for a herd of youngsters.

My family and I stumbled onto this Alberta park, 86 miles east of Calgary, because we had an extra few hours before we could check into our hotel in Drumheller, Alberta, 85 miles northwest. Our intended vacation highlight, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, is Drumheller’s centerpiece attraction.

A tourism clerk mentioned Dinosaur Provincial Park but said it really wasn’t worth the trip. Was she ever wrong. Our mistake was in not planning three days here.

The next mistake, it turns out, has little to do with deadly creepy crawlers, as I had worried. All too late, I read the sign, “Cactus plants are very common in the park, so please be careful wherever you step. Cactus spines can easily pierce the sole of your shoe.”

And the seat of your shorts, I find out, much to the humor of my 9-year-old daughter.

Despite my pierced dignity, I am continually amazed by the landscape.

Vistas show where the prairie abruptly throws off its grass skirt and reveals its bony hoodoos. Telescopes allow close-ups of both hoodoos and paleontologists.

“Hoodoos look like tall toadstools with bad haircuts,” says my daughter.

“Paleontologists look like short toadstools with better haircuts,” says my husband, looking through a telescope.

The paleontologists’ wide-brimmed hats add to the toadstool look. The telescopes focus on a dig site deep in the preserve, with no tourist access.

We learn that prospecting crews recently found an unprecedented five ankylosaur (armored dinosaur) skulls. They collected smaller specimens like an ancient turtle skull and turtle shells. Some of their work is displayed in the Royal Tyrrell Museum Field Station in the park. Other specimens join 100,000 fossils in the collection at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.

Additional remains of big-name dinosaurs like ankylosaur, stegoceras validum (roofed head) and styracosaurus albertensis (spiked lizard) remain cloistered in the sandstone crypt. My kids pick up these names like white lint to black socks. I struggle with each syllable.

“This is the final resting place for at least 50 horned dinosaurs,” the guide says. “They perished while trying to cross a flooding river - their final mistake.”

As dry as this sticker patch seems, it was once covered by a shallow sea that rolled from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The most recent sea, called the Bearpaw, receded about 70 million years ago, leaving the Bearpaw Formation of shales visible among the hoodoos.

About 13,000 years ago, water eroded from Glacial Lake Bassano and eventually created the Red Deer Valley. Erosion exposed layers of sandstone from the Late Cretaceous Period and uncovered the graveyard.

We return to the Royal Tyrrell Museum Field Station and the air-conditioned oasis inside. Instead of a tame and relaxing cool-down, life-like settings reveal dinosaur dramas. A petrified duckbill dinosaur tries to shake off a pack of predatory dromaeosaurs.

“Mommy, they look like attacking wolves,” gasps a youngster in the crowd.

They’re like mosquitoes, I say. I’m happy that we have to watch only for rattlesnakes, scorpions and black widow spiders.

We eventually made it to Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and more toothsome exhibits. Three days at the museum fueled dinosaur imaginations for years to come. While the museum laid out 11,200 square meters of paleontological awe, our trip proved complete for having walked on bones in Dinosaur Provincial Park.

This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO

Dinosaur Provincial Park Reservations: Campground, motel and bus tour reservations are highly recommended for summer visits.

Information: Dinosaur Provincial Park, P.O. Box 60, Patricia, Alberta, T0J 2K0; (403) 378-4342; www.gov.ab.ca/env/parks/prov-parks/dinosaur.

Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, (888) 440-4240 or (403) 823-7707.

For bus tours and bone-bed hikes reservations, call (403) 378-4344 or toll free in Alberta only, 310-0000.

For campsite reservations, call (403) 378-3700.

Brooks has several restaurants and lodging facilities. Call the Brooks Chamber at (403) 362-7641 for more information.

Alberta South Tourism information, (800) 661-1222.

Jurassic Inn in Drumheller, (888) 823-3466.

Rattlesnake tips: If you hike in rattlesnake country, watch where you walk, examine an area before you sit down and stay in open areas. Prod grasses or bushes before going through them to allow snakes to move away. Stop youngsters from running ahead or climbing hills.

Do not handle an injured or dead rattlesnake. Do not move if you hear a rattling sound until you know the snake’s location, then slowly move away. Do not lift rocks or logs or reach into any holes.