46º18’N 60º7.5’W 25-JUN-2026 – I’m returning to eastern Canada. I haven’t been here in 53 years. I was 19.
We left Port Townsend on the 5th of June, spent a night on the American side and crossed over. We’ve border crossed three times on this trip and never been asked a question beyond why are you/ why were you in Canada? The last time I crossed into eastern Canada was a different, though a very polite crossing with me allowing the customs guy to keep an allergy pill, over the belated protestations of my then girlfriend.
This trip has been a geology trip, Jennifer’s dream trip come true. We stopped a various geological sites: places where the layers of the planet were visible, a coal mine and a dinosaur graveyard in Alberta.
We spent the most time in Alberta of the provinces so far – that will change beginning tomorrow. (If you check the coordinates, you’ll know where we are going.) Drumheller and the area around there is where the Cretacious era dinosaurs fossils are exposed. The saying is that if you can go twenty feet without tripping over a fossil your not in Dinosuar Provincial Park. This isn’t hyperbole, but you must be on your hands and knees looking for fossils. Most are a few millimeters in size. The big dinosaurs are there, but either embedded in rock, or entombed.
This time, finally, the paleontolgical world has been specifying where the continents were at the time of whatever era they are talking about. For the times of the really big dinosaurs, Alberta was just above or below the equator. Nova Scotia was attached to Morocco. Things made sense for me finally. There were three die offs, mass extinctions, they’re referred to as. There were big dinosaurs, which weren’t called dinosaurs, that were all killed off, only to re-evolve ten or twenty million years later and be called dinosaurs.
[Interestingly, some researcher in Australia have predicted were in the middle of one, 40% of all species will disappear in the next couple of decades. Mostly insects, but as SCRAM meant in nuclear power development meant, the earth will do fine. In that college course, they talked about the amount of radiation necessary to result in mean dead earth. The guy teaching the course, then emphasized that this was air breathing creatures, creatures in the sea wouldn’t know anything had happened.]
The specific era in Alberta was four or five million years before T-Rex, but his smaller forbearer was present.
The number of these large beasts that existed was very large indeed, with herds of three thousand. But how many were there actually. No one, but no one would give a guess.
The land in Alberta is a plain with deep canyons cut out when fresh water carved up the land, leaving hoodoos standing. A hoodoo is a lump of harder earth which was not dissolved away by the rushing water, that still has the harder layer of stone supported by the column left behind. Yes, the plain that is Alberta where there were has a rock layer covering many layers of sand an other stuff below. As you know, as you descend, the layers were laid down over time. The lower the layer, the longer ago is was laid down.
These layers were quite flat. In Nova Scotia for example, the crashing of the continents where they bang together can made the layers tilt, go vertical, or fold on on top of the other, but here in Alberta they were in layers.
Which brings us back to how many dinosaurs were there. There areas dug out by the long ago water is a very small percentage of both the province and the land in the area. Is this exposed area representative of all of the are that wasn’t exposed? Is under the highways, under the developed and undeveloped land the same? Then the numbers are too high to calculate… but, were talking ten or twenty million years. That big a number is beyond comprehension. Elizabethan England was 600 years ago, the Egyptians were 4000 years ago. A million years is 250 times longer ago than the Egyptians, ten million is 2500 times. Ten million years, the number of years these large beasts roamed is 25,000 times the length of time since the Egyptians. So a billion of them, divided by ten million is just a thousand per year. There had to be many more than 100 billion of them. How many fossils are there starting with a population of 100 billion large animals?
Well, Canada and Alberta is very proud of these fossils. They have built the best museum I have ever seen, and the they label which are castings and which are actual fossils.
Jennifer and I spent eight hours in the museum. While we were there we started a conversation with one of the workers, Warren. Warren was quite knowledgeable and answered our questions. When I asked about how the place was funded, he spoke with enthusiasm and knowledge. He broke down the different entities that ran the place, who funded what, etc.
Warren mentioned that he started after high school when he rode his bike out and asked if he could volunteer. ‘‘I never left.’’
We spoke for about twenty minutes; I was feeling guilty about keeping him for so long so I broke off the conversation and said good bye.
After he did leave, I told Jennifer I should have asked him to walk around the museum with us.
The next day we went on a tour of the reserved lands at dinosaur park. The person taking us around (terrible weather, small group) was a young woman who has worked there three years and was discussing what she would do next – I thought I was monopolizing here and broke that off as well. We spoke later when she made it clear that we weren’t. I always encourage everyone to get a PhD. You have a much bigger effect when you run things rather than be an individual contributor – and you can get your own funding to decide what you’d like to work on.
A group of trucks went by while were we walking through the reserved lands. The woman mentioned the man driving one of the trucks. ‘‘He oversees the logistics of the site and ferries the researchers out. He’s an interesting guy. His name is Warren.’’ I mentioned we’d met someone named Warren. ‘‘He’s worked here his entire life,’’ the woman responded. I countered, ‘‘He didn’t go to college.’’ ‘‘Yes, he’s published papers, sponsored meetings, he runs lots of committees at the museum and internationally.’’
I should have asked him to walk with us.
Fossil hunting stopped for about 50-70 years in Alberta, and then started up again with people my age. It sounds like fishing in Alaska in the 70s, about the same time that fossil hunting got going. Very little oversight, great discoveries to be made, lots of fame to be gotten in fossils, and lots of wealth in fishing. Then came the regulations. Probably necessary in both, to both to prevent over fishing, and destruction of the fossil sites. You can’t keep any fossil you find in Alberta and most of the provinces and you need a license, which you must buy from someone who has one to commercial fish.
Who is Bertha Hart? I spoke with her in 1973 on the trip where the customs agent kept the allergy pill, which cost a dollar in 1973, about $11 in todays money. Keep reading.
End Part one.
