Discover Canada and Explore the Fossils of the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta
- Wayne Munday
- Sep 29
- 5 min read
Sip back and discover Canada and explore the Late Cretaceous fossils, dinosaurs and geodiversity of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Covering an area over 80 Km² near Drumheller the park offers the visitor a window into a Late Cretaceous Campanian Stage ecosystem between 76.7 – 74.3 million years ago along the margins of the Western Interior Seaway. This fossiliferous landscape sits within the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy whose First Nation People interpreted the dinosaur bones as the Grandfathers of the Buffalo they hunted and integrated them into their cultural myths and legends long before modern palaeontology research. Scientific exploration began with Canadian geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell’s 1884 discovery of an Albertosaurus skull inspiring the establishment of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. The park’s geology chronicles a transition from coastal to terrestrial and paralic environments: the Foremost Formation preserves nearshore sediments, the Oldman Formation captures river channels and floodplains, and the Dinosaur Park Formation, a 70–80-metre-thick vegetative floodplain, contains dense fossil assemblages, including articulated skeletons, large-scale bonebeds, and abundant plant remains. The notable Centrosaurus bonebeds reveal mass mortality events likely to have been caused by seasonal floods providing insights into their herd behaviour. The Bearpaw Formation caps the sequence, recording marine transgression and preserving ammonites, bivalves, mosasaur coprolites, and rare sharks, some yielding the iridescent gemstone ammolite. Sculpted over millions of years by wind, water, and frost, the park’s hoodoos and badlands continually expose new fossils, while strict UNESCO protections ensure their preservation for future research and education.
Dinosaur Provincial Park is a 80 km² area of badlands in south east Alberta a two hour drive west from Calgary and whose fossiliferous Belly River Group of rocks tell a story from the Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous period deposited between 76.7 - 74.3 million years ago along the margin of the Western Interior Seaway.
Dinosaur Provincial Park is deeply rooted in the Blackfoot Confederacy or Niitsítapi a historic and contemporary alliance of three Indigenous groups of the Siksika, Kainai, and Piikani people who shared a common language, culture and heritage as nomadic bison hunters on the Great Plains. They originally thought the fossil bones as the “Grandfathers of the Buffalo” and included them the myths, tales and legends about their relationship with the land.
Modern paleontology in the region began with Joseph Burr Tyrrell’s 1884 discovery of an Albertosaurus skull, a landmark find that ultimately led to the founding of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site fossil collection is prohibit and many bonebeds off-limits in the park. Visitors can engage with guided hikes, fossil safaris, and museum programs but must leave discoveries in place, document them with photos, and report them to the park, ensuring fossils remain available for research and education. Violating these rules carries serious legal consequences.
The Late Cretaceous Belly River Group is a sequence that stretches across southern Alberta and south western Saskatchewan and records a cycle of both regressive-transgressive coastal and inland depositional environments linked the shifting nature of the sea level of the Western Interior Seaway. The Western Interior Seaway was a vast, shallow epicontinental sea that extended far inland across continental North America separating Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. At its maximum extent the Western Interior Seaway stretched nearly 5,000Km from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico and reached depths of around 100 meters. The Western Interior Seaway lends itself to having exceptional fossil preservation because the combination of low-oxygen or anoxic seafloor conditions and fine-grained chalk sediments slowed decomposition and captured a lot of soft tissue detail.
This seaway had a rich marine biodiversity including large marine reptiles including the giant sea turtle Archelon, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs such as Elasmosaurus and marine crocodiles. Large predatory fish like Xiphactinus, along with diverse invertebrates including ammonites, Inoceramus bivalves, rudist bivalves and belemnites thrived. Fossils of Cretaceous birds such as Hesperornis a large, flightless, toothed seabird lived in the waters of the Western Interior Seaway whilst pterosaurs such as Pteranodon and Nyctosaurus patrolled in the skies.
The Belly River Group is made up of formations that show a sequence of coastal, terrestrial, and paralic or mixed marine and terrestrial environments. At its base, the Foremost Formation captures nearshore depositional environments recording sediments laid down along the margins of ancient seas. Above it, the Oldman Formation represents river channels and floodplain systems, composed of sandstones, mudstones and intermittent coal seams formed from the draining of the rising American Cordillera mountains. These river deposits often yield isolated dinosaur bones. Overlying the Oldman Formation is the 70 – 80-metre-thick Dinosaur Park Formation a substantially wetter vegetative floodplain environment and preserves a dense fossil assemblage of articulated dinosaur skeletons, large-scale bonebeds and abundant plant fossils.
The sequence is capped by the Bearpaw Formation showing a marine transgression across the plains around 72 million years ago dominated by ammonites such as Placenticeras, Hoploscaphites, and Sphenodiscus, some of which produce the iridescent gemstone ammolite. Rare vertebrate fossils include mosasaur coprolites and sharks like Paraorthacodus.
These formations hold one of the world’s richest terrestrial fossil assemblages of articulated skeletons, isolated bones and sizeable bonebeds of hadrosaurs, ceratopsians and theropods from the Late Cretaceous of western North America. Fossils from the park are displayed globally, with major collections housed at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta.
Among the park’s most dramatic discoveries are the Centrosaurus bonebeds and a vast fossil accumulation of Centrosaurus a horned dinosaur that died probably as a result of catastrophic mass death events where flooding swept herds into river channels or deltas. These floods were likely triggered by seasonal tropical storms and their rapid burial of these dinosaurs preserved their skeletons with minimal weathering or scavenging so they provide insights into how they grew and even their social behaviour. The bonebeds also show evidence of scavenging by large carnivores such as tyrannosaurids.
Beyond Centrosaurus, the Dinosaur Park Formation preserves a remarkable diversity of other dinosaurs and other vertebrates including hadrosaurs such as Corythosaurus and Lambeosaurus, ankylosaurs, pachycephalosaur, and a variety of of theropods from small troodontids and dromaeosaurs to large tyrannosaurids. Non-dinosaur vertebrates include turtles, crocodilians, champsosaurs, amphibians, lizards and a variety of freshwater fish along with an abundance of plant fossils, pollen and spores that collectively illustrate a coastal floodplain.
Today the Badlands of Alberta’s Badlands and particularly around the Drumheller region is the result of geological sculpting from erosion that has occurred over millions of years. Over time the impact of differential erosion has shaped these deposits into the deep valleys and rugged terrain that define the badlands we see today. Soft and exposed mudrocks and shales have been gradually carved by wind, water, and frost. Among the most iconic features are hoodoos of tall, pillar-like rock formations created when a harder and erosion resistant caprock protects the softer underlying rock. As surrounding mudrock erodes more quickly, isolated pillars remain, but the continued undermining of the cap eventually causes the hoodoos to collapse, perpetuating the cycle of landscape transformation. These processes not only produce dramatic scenery but also yield the preserve fossils over time.
