Educating Risa

I’m going to break my post about Dinosaur Provincial Park into two parts: the first on the park and badlands (“the outside”) and the tomorrow’s post on the excellent Interpretative centre (“the inside”). We were absolutely blown away by the park, and how many things there are to do. Next trip we will take the 2 hour interpretive bus tour into the off-limits parts of the park, and perhaps do another class or program as well. There are also several hiking trails we still want to do (we did about half of one, and there are 5 in total). Our family could easily spend a week there!

The entrance to the park is quite dramatic. When driving, all of a sudden the prairie drops away, and it is badlands as far as the eye can see:

There is an area to pull off into, and several interpretative signs. Here’s an excited Gareth:

and Daegan at the sign with information about DPP being designated as UNESCO World Heritage site, putting it in the same category as Stonehenge or the Pyramids:

The close-up of the sign reads: Dinosaur Provincial Park, which was nominated by Canada on behalf of Alberta, was placed on the World Heritage List at the 1979 meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee as a site of outstanding universal value forming part of the natural heritage of mankind. Dinosaur Park contains the largest and most comprehensive collection of Upper Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in the world and specimens are on display in major museums everywhere. It also contains excellent examples of badlands and an important riparian ecosystem supporting a wide variety of flora and fauna. [If you visit London’s Natural History Museum, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and countless other museums around the world, you will find many fossils on display are from DPP].

The badlands were carved by the Red Deer River:

and they have signs explaining this process. Here’s Gareth taking a look at the “Birth of the Badlands” display:

It’s hard to give a sense of scale of these lands in pictures, but I thought this photo did a reasonable job. I have labelled some items you can see:

There are just so many interesting ways wind and water have eroded the lands. Here’s the view right beside the interpretive centre:

One of the biggest surprises, to me, was how much wildlife we saw, especially unusual birds like this lark sparrow:

After a long visit at the interpretive centre, we headed on a gravel driving loop that took us to two fossil houses, and 3 trail heads. What is a fossil house? It’s a windowed shelter built over fossils that were found on site and remain in the ground. There are signs and displays, a plasticized book to flip through for more info, and an audio clip by Dr. Phil Currie (Canada’s best-known living palaeontologist) that is played by pushing a button:

There were lots of places to walk around the badlands:

You did have to be careful where you stepped, though—there were cacti everywhere!

Some of the cacti were already in bloom, lending a shocking burst of colour to an otherwise muted landscape:

At the second fossil house, we decided to embark on a hike. This hike has several interpretive signs along the way, and ends at a 1913 fossil quarry. We only made it about halfway, though—in the blazing heat, all of us sweated our bug spray off and were being eaten alive! The badlands trap the heat, and it can be much hotter here than in towns nearby. A temperature of 47C (117F) has been recorded here in the shade!

Jim read the safety warnings about not sticking your hands under rocks or ledges, or into cracks and crevices one more time for the boys. I think the boys were disappointed, but I was quite happy we didn’t see any rattlesnakes, scorpions, or black widow spiders:

The signs were interesting, and covered the earliest fossil finders in this area (The Blackfoot First Nations peoples) to Joseph Tyrrell (after whom the Royal Tyrrell Museum in nearby Drumheller is named) to the “Great Canadian Fossil Rush” of the early 1900s. I’m calling this Daegan’s history curriculum.

We also saw several interesting rock formations, and our minds were running wild with fossils. I dubbed these “stegosaurus rocks”, as they look very much like the plates on a stegosaur’s back to my eye:

Just before heading for home, Jim saw some bones. Not fossils—they’re clearly recent—but it had all of us wondering what creature met its demise in these badlands:

Tomorrow: the interpretive centre at DPP. A lot more than just dinosaurs!