Dinosaur Provincial Park

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park is one of the scientific wonders of the world, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. Here, under the most fortunate of circumstances (fortunate for science and for interested posterity, if not for the dinosaurs), extraordinary bone beds have been preserved through untold millennia. Great piles of mixed remains provide a gigantic puzzle for paleontologists to solve as best they may; the tangled remains remind one observer of the aftermath of the recent river flood that killed 3,000 caribou in Quebec. Over 500 museum-calibre specimens have been removed from the Red Deer Valley, and are now on display around the world. Albertans would now happily reclaim their dispersed treasure, but say gamely enough that, “We’re going to surpass all their collections within ten years or more.”

One of the three largest bone beds known to man, Dinosaur Provincial Park has been open to the public since 1959. Directions to it are included in the book, as are an array of fascinating colour and black and white photographs of the excavations in progress, displays, reconstructed dinosaurs, and the dramatic, moonscape-like scenery of the area.