Channel your inner paleontologist in Alberta, Canada, home to the world’s greatest concentration of dinosaur fossils

“That’s a piece of a vertebra. Not worth collecting… We’ve got lots of those,” says Jessica Glombick as we walk among the striated badlands and towering hoodoos of Dinosaur Provincial Park in southeastern Alberta, a prairie province in western Canada.

I slowly see what she means. This mesmerizing landscape dramatically eroded, multi-colored hillsides (badlands) and pinnacles of rock (hoodoos) looks like something out of a science-fiction novel, littered with fossils from a distant past when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Ancient teeth and tiny bone fragments lie exposed and scattered on the open ground, disregarded in favor of larger specimens—the ones deemed worthy of excavation.

Glombick, who leads the park’s visitor experience team, is giving me a taster of what makes this region such a hub of dinosaur discovery. More than 400 partial dinosaur skeletons, including 40-plus dinosaur species, have been unearthed here over the last century, ending up in museums around the world, along with hundreds of other fossilized organisms. Experts estimate there is at least another century’s worth of new discoveries waiting to be unearthed.

Almost every time I spot something interesting on the ground, it turns out to be a remnant of one of the ancient creatures that hunted, grazed, or scavenged in this area many millions of years ago.

One such creature is Albertasaurus, the star of episode four, ‘The Pack,’ of Walking with Dinosaurs. Described in the series as “a smaller, but just as deadly, relative of T. rex,” Albertasaurus could reach speeds of up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) an hour—and is believed to have hunted its prey in packs before tearing it to pieces with its enormous mouthful of sharp teeth.

Around 77 to 74 million years ago, the area that is now southern Alberta was a warm, humid, coastal estuary covered in huge expanses of swamp, marshland, and meandering rivers that provided dinosaurs with abundant food sources including ferns, shrubs. Frequent large-scale flooding killed vast numbers of dinosaurs, which were quickly covered up by sediments that eventually tuned to stone. The geologic uplift that created the Rocky Mountains also added abundant minerals to the groundwater, facilitating the process of turning bones into fossils.

The same erosion that sculpted—and continues to shape—the badlands has also exposed many of the fossils we see today, making them easy to find and extract. Glombick points out a large bone lying fully exposed on the ground.

Pipestone Creek Bonebed is known for having one of the greatest concentrations of dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world—roughly 100 to 300 bones per square meter.

It’s from an Ankylosaurus, an armored dinosaur that roamed the badlands at the end of the Cretaceous Period, about 68 to 66 million years ago. Paleontologists found a nearly complete Ankylosaurus skeleton here in the early 1990s—all but the tail, which was discovered years later by a different team. The bones matched up perfectly.

The Blackfoot and Cree First Nations—the Indigenous peoples of the region—have long known about the ancient bones scattered among the formations, considering them either “grandfathers of the bison” (the sacred animal of the Blackfoot people) or the remains of giants, fossil hunters arrived only in the late 1800s. Even now, groundbreaking discoveries continue to be made—and not always by the professionals. Members of a visiting music band, touring the park with Glombick, found bones from an unknown dinosaur species as recently as last year.

While several prehistoric treasures discovered in Alberta’s badlands are on display at the national park’s visitor center, the majority have found their way to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller , a town of approximately 8,400 people located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Here I walk through a 3.9-billion-year history of life on Earth in a different way.

Wandering through room after room filled with astonishingly well-preserved fossils, I linger over a massive  Triceratops skull and a complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, both discovered in Alberta’s southwestern corner. The Triceratops skull, nicknamed Calli after its discovery site, Callum Creek, measures five feet in width and six feet from the beak to the top of the frill. The T. rex, nicknamed Black Beauty, is mounted in a dramatic death pose and owes its striking black color to the presence of manganese in the water where it was fossilized.

In the vast Dinosaur Hall, which houses more than 30 mounted dinosaur skeletons, I spot the Albertasaurus as well as Pachyrhinosaurus, a herbivorous species that features in episode five, ‘The Journey North’ of Walking with Dinosaurs. That particular Pachyrhinosaurus, along with many other fossils in the Royal Tyrrell Museum, was unearthed further northwest in Alberta, at a site called the Pipestone Creek Bonebed. It’s known for having one of the greatest concentrations of dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world—roughly 100 to 300 bones per square meter.

To see this fossil goldmine for myself, I catch a short flight from Calgary to the northern Alberta city of Grande Prairie, then take a cab to the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Wembley, about 13 miles (21 kilometers) due west. Though much smaller than the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the Currie Museum is filled with equally impressive specimens, many of them discovered at the Pipestone Creek site, which it administers.

Experts believe some sort of catastrophic event, probably a flood, at Pipestone Creek wiped out an enormous Pachyrhinosaurus herd who were most likely on a seasonal migration. Later, a second flood swept up all the bones and channeled them into a big jumble—a “Pachyrhinosaurus omelet,” as Dr. Emily Bamforth, curator and paleontologist at the Currie Museum, describes it.

In the museum’s fossil prep lab, Dr. Bamforth shows off some of the hundreds of specimens her team is currently working on, including Big Sam, a huge 600-pound (272-kilogram) Pachyrhinosaurus skull discovered at Pipestone Creek in 2023.

Dr. Bamforth and her colleagues estimate that there may have been as many as 10,000 Pachyrhinosauruses in the Pipestone Creek population. It would take 100 years for one person to prepare all currently remaining fossils—and that’s without considering the roughly 1,000 fossils uncovered every summer both here and at other sites in the region.

“The Tyrrell shows you the end product. We show you the process,” the museum’s executive director Linden Roberts tells me, adding that their goal is for everyone who visits the Currie Museum to have some sort of interaction with a paleontologist.

Visitors who register in advance can volunteer in the fossil prep lab and get hands-on experience extracting and preserving dinosaur fossils under guidance from the museum’s paleontology staff. Another popular offering is the museum’s signature ‘Paleontologist for a Day’ experience at the Pipestone Creek Bonebed, which starts with a tour of the lab, followed by a hike to the dig site, an area of exposed rocky ground near the present-day flow of Pipestone Creek and surrounded by a mixed forest of spruce, aspen, poplar, and willow.

Dinosaurs may not have survived whatever long-ago natural disaster struck the badlands of Alberta, but wildlife continues to thrive in the province’s spectacular landscape.

The bonebed extends for about a kilometer from the tennis court-sized plot currently under excavation—the team only opens as much of the site as they expect to be able to get through during the dig season. Perched rather awkwardly in on a large flat rock, I chip away at a small patch of ground in the bonebed with a rock hammer and chisel. I make no earthshattering discoveries, but gain infinite respect for the patience necessary for a career in paleontology.

Dinosaurs may not have survived whatever long-ago natural disaster struck the badlands of Alberta, but wildlife continues to thrive in the province’s spectacular landscape. A four-hour drive south from Pipestone Creek brings me to Jasper National Park. Here, the jagged peaks of the Canadian Rockies rise above a forested landscape of pristine lakes, bisected by the meandering Athabasca River.

My first wildlife encounter comes soon after crossing into the park: A herd of bighorn sheep grazing and lounging by the side of the road. This species of sheep is native to North America, and named, of course, for its large horns, which can weigh up to 16 pounds (seven kilograms) each.

Jasper National Park is a nature lover’s paradise. As I continue into the park to the town of Jasper, gorgeous views of mountains, lakes, and rivers open up in all directions, marred only by the stands of burned trees torched in the fire that ravaged Jasper last summer when several wildfires broke out and, fueled by strong wind gusts, merged into one massive blaze that burned an estimated 32,654 hectares and destroyed about a third of the town.

The damage is stark, but the park’s landscapes remain stunning, and local residents and wildlife have proved resilient. During my stay, I join an e-bike tour along the park’s backroads, pedaling effortlessly past more lakes and gorgeous mountain views. Every guide, driver, and hospitality worker I meet has a story to tell about the Jasper fires, but all the people I meet, even those who lost their homes and all their possessions—including my bike tour guide, Tasha—express nothing but love for this spectacular place and a determination to rebuild.

Many areas escaped unscathed. Canoeing along Pyramid Lake, its calm, crystal-clear waters reflecting the surrounding snow-capped mountains, there’s no sign of any disturbance. I watch loons skim across the water, their striking red eyes laser-focused as they dive for their dinner, while high above, a black-billed magpie surveys the scene from a tall spruce tree.

As I travel south along the Icefields Parkway, I see more wildlife—a bear, a moose, a herd of mountain goats—in this magnificent landscape, and I think: These mountains were just forming when the dinosaurs were roaming Alberta’s forests and badlands. How might a Pachyrhinosaurus or an Albertasaurus have fit into this newer ecosystem of mountains, lakes, and wide riverbeds? What would today’s natural world be like if dinosaurs had survived to roam side-by-side with moose, bears, and bighorn sheep?

After walking in the footsteps of dinosaurs in Alberta’s forests and badlands, I can just about begin to imagine their world and how the mysterious catastrophic event that caused their extinction also opened the door for the amazing wildlife that roams the beautiful landscapes of today.

I’m left with a feeling of wonder. I already knew Alberta was one of North America’s great destinations for wildlife and scenic beauty. Now I know it’s also one of the best places in the world to see dinosaur fossils and experience the magic and mystery of paleontological discovery up close.

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