Name:
Dinosaur Provincial ParkLocation:
Alberta, CanadaDate of Fossil Sediments:
Late Cretaceous (75 million years ago)Dinosaurs Found:
Albertosaurus, Struthiomimus, Euoplocephalus, CentrosaurusAbout Dinosaur Provincial Park:
The last Ice Age did more than just cover large parts of North America in sheets of ice--when these glaciers retreated, they gouged out huge tracts of land, exposing the ancient rocks beneath. That's what appears to have happened at Dinosaur Provincial Park, where 75-million year old sediments (dating from the late Cretaceous period) were uncovered about 15,000 years ago.
The first paleontologist to investigate this remote outcropping in Alberta, Canada was the ubiquitous Barnum Brown, who also pioneered digs at Montana's Hell Creek. Since 1909, when Brown made his initial expedition, more articulated dinosaur skeletons have been found at Dinosaur Provincial Park than at any other fossil site, with the tally including ornithomimids, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, sauropods and ankylosaurs (not to mention hundreds of fishes, frogs, pterosaurs and mammals).
Like another famous North American fossil site, Dinosaur National Monument in the western U.S., Dinosaur Provincial Park appears to have been an ancient flood plain, where thousands of dinosaurs at a time would be drowned (and quickly buried in silt) by flash floods from nearby rivers. Conveniently, the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology (located smack in the middle of the site) displays many of the skeletons that have been unearthed there (and countless others have been distributed to museums around the world).
