North America > Canada > Alberta > Drumheller > Articles > In the Valley of the Kong Longs

Godzilla was here in the flesh. I’ve got his teeth marks on a 75-million year-old souvenir to prove it. Well actually it was an Albertosaurus, the smaller Tyrannosauridae relative of the T-Rex, that attacked the poor vegetarian Hadrosaur whose chunk of fossilized tibia I held in my grasp. They remember him well around here as a two-tonne, eight-metre long ferocious hunter, with curved saw-like teeth for tearing chunks of flesh, and legs that could sprint 40km an hour. His bones, and the gnawed bones of his victims, are everywhere.

You hear lots of dinosaur yarns around Drumheller where, in the badlands, you can camp beside the footprints of Hadrosaurs and inhale the antediluvian dust of excavations at work, and see more complete dinosaur excavated skeletons from the Cretaceous Age than anywhere on the planet.

Drumheller, Alberta, a one-time coal and dinosaur-bone boom town with a dusty-sounding name, is only 80 miles northeast of Calgary’s cowboy hoopla and the world’s biggest Stampede. But the short drive along Route 9 is a jolt into Paleolithic time. The landscape of rolling farmland and billowing prairie grass abruptly cracks open and drops away into steep coulees, gulches, canyons, mud drapings, buttes and wind-scarred hoodoos - Mesozoic sandstone pillars whipped into eerie toadstools by millenniums of erosion. It's easy to imagine this raw, scoured landscape where Quest for Fire was filmed as thundering with triceratops and bloodthirsty dromeosaurs. But as I was to learn, the habitat of the dinosaurs had been no dusty windblown desert.

It was Canadian geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell’s discovery one Spring day in 1884 that triggered the Great Canadian Dinosaur Rush. Tyrrell was paddling down the Red Deer River on a coal surveying expedition for the Geological Survey of Canada. He gazed up at an eroded cliff and saw “a great ugly face with rows of sharp spine-like teeth” grinning down at him. Tyrrell had sighted the skull of what was to be named an Albertosaurus sarcophagus, and the discovery sent tremors of excitement throughout the paleontology world.

In the fossil shops in Drumheller, they tell stories about the“Bone Wars,” when the badlands around here swarmed with greedy fossil mongers coming with horse carts and flatboats to ship boxcars of dino relics to great museums in Chicago, New York, Washington, London, Edinburgh, Paris and Buenas Aires, and to private “bone barons.” Today the whole area around Alberta’s Red Deer River Valley is still lousy with bones. Especially hadrosaurs, which 75,000,000 years ago were as common in these parts as prairie dogs.

These 40-foot long, 7-ton crested, duckbilled dinosaurs had 2,000 teeth, but gnawed on coniferous leaves and soft plants shovelled up from the bottom of the primeval swamp. They’ve been excavated north of the Arctic Circle and as far south as Patagonia, but more have turned up in Alberta than anywhere else. Before the Canadian Historical Resources Act declared fossils dug up after 1978 “property of the Crown in Right of Alberta,” locals used hadrosaur skeletons for lawn ornaments and fences, built rock gardens and fireplaces with them, and stockpiled them in their basements.

John Parsons, who runs the Fossil Shop, has enough treasures from 30 years of bone hunts to keep his descendants in business for a long time. Hadrosaur vertebrae, skulls with teeth intact, ceratopsian leg bones. But all I wanted was a hadrosaur fragment, and thought it would be ironic to pay for it with a credit card.

I laid my piece of plastic on the counter in exchange for the dinosaur excavated from the badlands of the Horseshoe Canyon. Seven bucks. The buff-colored piece of bone looked like polished driftwood, until you felt its weight, saw the spongy marrow cells at its broken ends, and learned that the long, grooved channels were caused by a Tyrannosauridae pulling the bone through its teeth like a piece of dental floss.
Kids love the saurian silliness and dino-fied commerce of Drumheller - Dinosaur Motel, Jurassic Inn, the Dinosaur Trail Golf and Country Club and the 70-foot high T-Rex which they can walk up through to a viewing platform in its grizzly mouth! But after browsing the shops I’m ready for a deeper venture into Alberta’s Dinosaur Country.

First stop three miles down the road - the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. Victorian reptilian ossuaries were “dreary halls of bones” but the Tyrrell is a stunning complex set into 12,500 acres of badlands. It celebrates three million years of life on Earth - from one-celled organisms, through the Triassic age of reptiles, Jurassic and Cretaceous ages of the dinosaurs, early mammals, the ice age, and primitive man. But hands down, the Dinosaur Hall is the Tyrrell museum's most sensational attraction. Here are 40 complete skeletons, the largest number of “Kong Longs” (as the Chinese call dinosaurs) ever assembled under one roof, along with dinosaur eggs and skin impressions. They come alive in Vladimir Krb’s painted dioramas depicting Alberta 75 million years ago as a broad lowland of steaming swamps, redwood groves and brackish bayous fed by the shallow Bearpaw Sea

You gawk at the measly cranium of the stegosaurus, how this bone-head with a 70-gram brain survived long enough to mate. You're amazed at the dinosaur nesting site found on a windswept prairie near Devil's Coulee. Here Tyrrell museum paleontologists found over 20 nests containing hot-dog size eggs of the bony-crested hadrosaur with embryos “ready to hatch.”

It can be disappointing to learn that many of dino skeletons on view are assembled from fibreglass casts made from the real bones. But when a Tyrannosaurus Rex tibia weighs 300 pounds and takes two cavemen to lift it, imagine trying to mount a whole skeleton in a dynamic life-like pose! Many bone specimens are just too fragile, brittle or too fragmented to display.

Taking a museum trail walk through the badlands in the cool of a morning or before the dying embers of a flaming sunset is a thrill, especially when it’s over a Centrosaurus bone bed or beside spooky "hoodoos" which local Blackfoot and Cree believed were petrified giants who came alive after dark. But after a rainfall, trail conditions can be treacherous, if in a comical way.

“Spronking” is the local jargon for slipping on wet bentonite, the pervasive fine whitish clay formed from decayed volcanic ash. Dry bentonite looks like popcorn showered madly on the hills. After a rain, it swells to 10 times its volume and makes a sheet of soapy slime. As it dries, it resembles popcorn again, but watch out! The still-damp particles inside slide like greased ball bearings.

It was a bone dry June day - no chance of a flash flood - so I set out to drive the Dinosaur Trail. I headed north on route 838 along the east side of the Red Deer River past the sagebrush flats of Midland Provincial Park, once a badlands coal-mining site, and the pump jacks of the West Drumheller oil field, to the scenic Horsethief Canyon. From the canyon there are great views of the Red Deer Valley's colorful striated canyon walls, and trails lead down the escarpment to petrified 67-million-year-old oyster beds. Kicking up the earth as I walked, I kept my eyes peeled for scraps of hadrosaurs, even though Alberta's Historical Resources Act of 1978 declares fossils found in the province after 1978 "property of the Crown in right of Alberta."

I rumbled down a dusty track to cross the Red Deer River on the creaking Bleriot ferry, a six-car, cable-pulled craft that is one of Alberta's last. The South Dinosaur Trail (route 575) winds along the west side of the river past a grassland habitat of fragrant pasture sage, and spear grass, wheat grass, june grass and blue grama. At Lookout Point a small road leads to another valley panorama of V-shaped coulees and river bluffs dotted with tepee rings, circles of stones that once held Blackfoot and Cree tepees tight against stiff winds.

Thirty miles from Brooks is the Tyrrell Museum's field station and Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which gives the public access to sites where dinosaur footprints and skin impressions have been discovered, and bone beds equalled only by sites in China's Gobi desert. Every summer a drama unfolds here as volunteers flock to dig in the earth for pieces of the dinosaur mystery that nature's forces have miraculously resurrected from the floor of the long-vanished Bearpaw Sea.

Articles

• More from Nancy Lyon