The museum technician held her shards of hadrosaur leg together, waiting for the glue to dry. It is now one of the premier dinosaur museums in the world. One hundred and one years after Albertosaurus was discovered, the Tyrrell Museum opened with the “Royal” designation of Queen Elisabeth II. The Great Canadian Dinosaur Rush of 1910-1917 resulted in the collection of thousands of fossils, many leaving the country to become part of collections in museums from the U.S. Joseph Burr Tyrrell (1858-1957), the Canadian geologist who found the first Albertosaurus fossil in 1884.
The skull he found was later named for this newly founded Canadian Province: Albertosaurus sarcophagus. In 1884, a 26-year old geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada found the skull of a meat-eating dinosaur a few kilometres from Drumheller. The history of fossil collecting in Alberta goes back to the late 1800s, when the first dinosaur remains were found in Canada. Roller doors running the height of each wall permit access with trucks and small cranes to transport such huge fossils into the workspace. Unlike the modest limb-bone being worked on in the gallery, many of the specimens in the main area were huge: blackened skeletons encased in rocky coffins the size of paddling pools. This concrete-floored, warehouse-like space was peppered with workbenches, their surfaces a mess of assorted tools, equipment for removing rock and dust, and fossils in mid-preparation. Beyond the desk, a large window allowed views into the main fossil preparation area. The technician was on duty at a table in the Royal Tyrrell Museum, where visitors can observe first-hand the work of carefully repairing and preparing fossils found in these geologic pages for the Museum collections. Spectacular geologic outcrops preserve entire ancient ecosystems, documenting them in pages made of rock.” “Marine reptiles, sharks and other fish in the sea, turtles, crocs and other reptiles in freshwater, dinosaurs, small mammals and lizards on land, and birds flying in the sky. This rich dinosaurian record is heavily reliant on what is known from Cretaceous Laramidia, the Western sub-continent.” I asked him what kind of life lived in Cretaceous Alberta. He painted a vivid picture of the landscape he studies: “lush tropical forests covered the lowlands, incised by creeks and streams running from the very young Rocky Mountains, and filled with fresh water gathered from seasonal storms.” It was the runoff of fresh sediments from the uplands that covered the remains of animals and plants in the valleys below, often washing them into lakes and rivers, and preserving them for millions of years.Ĭhiarenza’s research focuses on the dinosaurs of Late Cretaceous North America “I am interested in how a changing climate and geography interacted with living species in the Cretaceous to shape their evolution and distribution on land. “The Western Interior Seaway was a warm and shallow sea that danced frequently changing its depth and extension several times,” explained Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, PhD researcher at Imperial College London. Illustration: Sampson et al 2010/Wikimedia Commons
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