Adapted from Dinosaur Provincial Park
Dinosaur Provincial Park: Courtesy of Alberta Environment
Calgary & Southern Alberta
The great rivers that flowed in the badlands 75 million years ago left sand and mud deposits that make up the valley walls, hills and hoodoos of modern-day Dinosaur Provincial Park. Then the landscape was very different. The climate here was subtropical, like northern Florida is today. Lush forests covered a coastal plain. Rivers flowed east, across the plain into a warm inland sea. The low swampy country was home to a variety of animals, including dinosaurs. The conditions were just perfect for the preservation of their bones as fossils. Today, after a century of excavations, over 150 complete dinosaur skeletons have been discovered as well as great disorganized concentrations of bones called "bone beds". At the end of the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago, water from the melting ice carved the valley through which the Red Deer River now flows. Today, water from prairie creeks and run-off continues to sculpt the layers of these badlands, the largest in Canada. The result is an eerie landscape that looks like another world. The park was designated a World Heritage Site in 1979 by the United Nations in recognition of three significant features: the badlands, a terrain unique unto itself, the endangered riparian (riverside) habitat with its towering plains cottonwoods, as well as one of the highest concentrations of palaeontological resources with the fossils of the late Cretaceous period.
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