Dinosaurs have been an interest of mine since childhood. Little me would memorize every single species I could find in the books and their family, size, and modern-day locality. But I don’t think any of that could prepare me for stumbling upon and being able to hold hadrosaur vertebrae while trekking across the Albertan badlands. On one hand, I do think that fossil locales of every geological period are all somewhat equally valuable; as fossils become newer, they tend to be more complex and “impressive” whereas age in itself is already impressive, and fossils from different eras all help us to understand the history of our complex world and paint a picture of what life was like at any given point in geological history. That being said, I do have a bias for fulfilling childhood dreams, and there is just something so amazing about seeing fossils, big and small, of the very creatures that used to dominate the planet’s ecosystems. Dinosaur Provincial Park is the greatest record of the apex of the Age of the Reptiles, and it’s so easy to experience it firsthand if you’re in the area. This was one of my greatest experiences with a WHS.

I visited Dinosaur Provincial Park in July 2024, after spending the night in Brooks, about half an hour away. It was a hot day, but I arrived fairly early in the morning to make it to the 9am Fossil Finders tour that I had booked. Here’s a heads-up for anyone who wants to visit and doesn’t really understand which tour is best for you: the tours that take you into the most prolific fossil deposits are the Centrosaurus Bonebed / Bonebed Express tours and the Fossil Finders tour, so go for those as long as you’re physically able to hike as you will traverse fairly rough terrain through the badlands (walking sticks are provided). The difference between these is that the Bonebed tours go to the Centrosaurus Bonebed that contains many larger dinosaur fossils, while the Fossil Finders tour goes to a microfossil site where you can find many teeth, vertebrae, and shell and bone fragments of many different reptile species. I initially booked it due to the Bonebed tour being out of slots, but luck was on my side that morning as I found out I was the only person on the tour. I essentially paid $25 for a private tour with an air-conditioned bus, and I had my knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide Lois all to myself. She told me all about the park and her decades working in it, which is why she had no trouble leading me through this nearly non-existent trail - extremely high rates of erosion mean that human-made erosion in the badlands makes negligible difference. On the way, she pointed out all the different plant species inhabiting this harsh landscape, including three different species of cacti. 

Every now and then, we would stumble on numbered poles, marking excavation sites of whole dinosaur skeletons, and as we got closer, we would see bone fragments more and more. Out of the blue, there appeared two huge dark bones laying on the dry cracked ground, seemingly weighing over 5kg. Lois questioned me on it, and I thankfully correctly identified it as a hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) vertebra. Guess I still had it, a bit! The hike took around 30-40 minutes, and at the end, we arrived at the microfossil site. I could literally count hundreds, maybe thousands, of little fossils littering the ground in a little barren basin. Lois gave me an identification guidebook to help me figure out what something could be. Most of what you could find were unidentifiable bone fragments, but every now and then, something more distinctive would come up. I found a vertebra of Champsosaurus, a crocodile-like reptile; a shell fragment of Aspideretoides, a soft-shell turtle; a vertebra of some extinct fish; and many more hadrosaur (duck-billed herbivore, the most common here), ankylosaur (armored herbivore), and ceratopsid (horned, frilled herbivore) remains. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my guide’s favorite fossil, the hexagonal teeth of Myledaphus, a guitarfish species. Still, I was over the moon to be able to discover and hold all these fossils. After a while, we hiked back to the bus and took off. On the way out of the restricted zone, we stopped at a spot that Lois wanted to show me. It was the remains of a petrified forest, with a few stone tree trunks and many fossilized wood fragments. 

More fossils are on display in the visitor center, and you can drive/hike out to two in-situ hadrosaur skeletons in the public-access area of the park. These are huge, and just like I remember from the books, they could stretch to 10 meters in length. Here, you can appreciate the scale of these creatures; you may also experience this in the Drumheller museum. But I think the greatest aspect of this site is that it realizes the most complete record of the ecosystem of Cretaceous North America. Beyond dinosaurs, you can see everything from the sea creatures to the ancient forests. To me, all of these things make Dinosaur Provincial Park perhaps the greatest fossil site one could ever visit. Of course, the beautiful badlands are a cherry on top.