Famed dino hunter displays on the historical past of paleontology

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EDMONTON — Canada’s famed dinosaur hunter and one of many inspirations for the “Jurassic Park” phenomenon turned 75 earlier this 12 months and has no plans to drop his chisel and rock hammer.

Philip Currie says he’ll hold digging till he’s one with the fossils he has spent his life unearthing.

“I made a decision once I was about 40 or 50 that I used to be going to proceed till, instantly someday within the (Alberta) Badlands, I’d go poof and I’d be gone,” Currie mentioned in an interview forward of the museum that’s named after him celebrating its tenth anniversary.

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And he says earlier than he does go, he hopes to seek out an intact specimen in Alberta of his favorite dinosaur — Troodon formosus.

It’s a brainy, big-eyed dinosaur that resembles the nasty, two-legged, big-tailed and sharp-toothed velociraptor made well-known within the “Jurassic Park” film sequence.

“(It) was most likely essentially the most clever dinosaur we all know,” mentioned Currie.

“It’s obtained the most important mind. It has eyes that face ahead in a manner that gave it binocular imaginative and prescient. And now we all know they have been feathered.”

In different components of the world, tooth of an analogous dinosaur have been discovered with serrations as massive as these of a T. Rex’s tooth.

“We nonetheless haven’t obtained an entire specimen (of the Troodon formosus) wherever within the Western North America. It’s loopy,” he mentioned.

“I’d like to see them simply to be taught from it and see what we obtained proper and what we obtained flawed.”

The Troodon will be seen in a demise pose within the brand of a museum named after Currie in Wembley in northern Alberta.

The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum is marking its 10-year anniversary subsequent 12 months by exhibiting its latest and largest discovery in northern Alberta up to now — the cranium of a pachyrhinosaurous. The cranium alone is the dimensions of a child elephant.

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The Wembley centre is amongst a number of museums Currie has helped construct in Canada and world wide, together with China and Japan, as dinosaur analysis boomed over the course of his profession.

It started when he was a 12-year-old rising up in Ontario, studying the Roy Chapman Andrews ebook “All About Dinosaurs” and dashing by way of the Royal Ontario Museum, taking a look at all of the dinosaur shows, assured he would someday hunt a few of his personal.

Many of the fossils have been from Alberta, so he moved there to work.

‘Proof of historical life’

He says the province is dwelling to the Dinosaur Provincial Park, east of Calgary, the place 50 species of dinosaurs and 150 species of turtles, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, flying reptiles, mammals and fish lived collectively.

“That makes it top-of-the-line sandboxes or playgrounds for anyone like me,” he mentioned with amusing.

On his first day trip within the area, round 1976, he uncovered his first fossil: a backbone. “I used to be holding in my palms dinosaur bones — this proof of historical life.”

He labored on the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, however his experience has taken him to dinosaur bonebeds all around the world, together with often to Mongolia and China, together with the College of Alberta in Edmonton, the place he teaches.

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Whereas his topics have been lengthy gone hundreds of thousands of years in the past, the science of digging them up has ebbed and flowed for a few century.

Within the Nineteen Twenties, among the world’s first paleontologists, together with Andrews, had already accomplished expeditions to China’s Gobi Desert, regardless of the warlords that dominated the world, and unearthed among the largest dinosaur fossils seen on the time.

However till the Nineteen Seventies, Currie mentioned, the Nice Despair and world wars halted additional discoveries. It was additional hampered by the faulty perception there have been few dinosaurs left to be discovered.

From the Nineteen Sixties by way of the ’80s, paleontology grew a bit, aided by advances in know-how, however remained within the shadows of in style science.

In 1993, Hollywood modified that.

Paleontologists checked out like detectives

Director Steven Spielberg launched “Jurassic Park.” Primarily based on the ebook by Michael Crichton, it informed a narrative of paleontologists pursuing — and being pursued by — dinosaurs introduced again to life.

Whereas creating his lead character, Alan Grant, Crichton was impressed by the few paleontologists working on the time, together with Currie. Crichton has acknowledged it was Currie’s analysis technique that piqued his curiosity.

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Currie mentioned the ebook and flicks have proven the world paleontology is “multidisciplinary” and that bones inform tales of not solely what lived however the way it lived.

Paleontologists, in flip, have been considered much less as diggers and extra like detectives.

“You’re, to begin with, digging (proof) up. You then’re making an attempt to determine what’s it or who’s the sufferer, why did they die, why are they being discovered on this explicit manner, and what can we be taught from this,” he mentioned.

“Each time you reply one query, you find yourself with two extra questions.”

He mentioned the hours he has spent digging and brushing dust off fossils in Alberta and all world wide have humbled and matured him.

“Whenever you’re taking a look at dinosaurs, you search for proof for why they grew to become extinct,” he mentioned.

“If dinosaurs hadn’t turn out to be extinct, what would we appear to be now? Regardless that I’m not non secular, I take into consideration these items on an even bigger scale.

“It’s not simply an asteroid hitting the world 65 million years in the past. There’s something else occurring.

“Our story is incomplete.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first printed Oct. 13, 2024.

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