Camping in Dinosaur Provincial Park is like being in bed with dinosaurs from 75 million years ago. The park, 220 kilometres east of Calgary, is recognized as the richest dinosaur fossil site in the world.
Set in the exceptionally dramatic scenery of the Alberta Badlands, the fossil beds contain some of the most important dinosaur fossil discoveries ever made, numbering some 60 dinosaur species about 75 million years old.
It all began in 1889 when Thomas C. Weston of the Geological Survey of Canada found the fossil of an Albertosaurus, a smaller cousin of the famous T-Rex. Since then, more than 400 dinosaur skeletons have been found in the park.
In 1979, the park was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site as being “of outstanding universal value forming part of the natural heritage of mankind.”
Its lofty heritage status aside, the park, equipped with nearly 200 campsites for tents and RVs, plus showers, a laundromat and the Cretaceous Café, is an ideal family destination. Also available are sturdy canvas tents furnished for comfort camping with real beds, pillows and bedding, with private patios, electricity, kitchen supplies and gas barbecues.
Click for detailed park information.
Doubling as the field station of Royal Tyrrell Museum (located in Drumheller, 176 km to the northwest) the Visitor Centre shares excellent interpretive displays and a souvenir shop.
To quote the Travel Alberta website:
The true draw of Dinosaur Provincial Park however, is in the dirt. Dinosaurs walked the Alberta Badlands during the Late Cretaceous Period 75 million years ago, when the sub-tropical climate nourished lush forests and great rivers that flowed east toward a warm inland sea. The environment provided homes for a variety of creatures big and small, including sharks, turtles and crocodiles. Reptiles with wingspans wider than a small plane soared across the skies.
Those great rivers left behind the sand and mud deposits where dinosaur bones were quickly buried and then fossilized, and now form the hills and hoodoos of the Badlands. When the last ice age ended 13,000 years ago, water from melting ice carved the valley where the Red Deer River flows, helping to create perfect conditions for fossil preservation.
Today, rain and run-off from prairie creeks remove one centimetre of earth from the Badlands every year, continuously exposing new fossils. Five per cent of the known dinosaurs in the world have been unearthed in Dinosaur Provincial Park, with many more to come.
Our fossil hunting was limited to following a scenic loop road where we found the nearly complete skeleton of a duck-billed dinosaur in a fossil display house. These bones are "in-situ", still partially encased in the sediment that buried them 75 million years ago.
All in all, Dinosaur Provincial Park is a highly recommended destination.
TRIP DATA
Day 32: 6,627 km from home
Recommended: Guide to visiting Dinosaur Provincial Park
Next stop: Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan bordering Montana.