Wild Wanderings: Badlands & Dinosaurs

A fantastical landscape in Dinosaur Provincial Park

I lucked out with a beautiful day to spend here at Dinosaur Provincial Park.
I've adopted a new strategy to make the most out of the daylight hours: spend all day somewhere, taking advantage of the late light and sunset, then drive in the long twilight to the next spot. Camping in the car makes this easy, although sometimes it is interesting to find a spot to sleep.

Night driving

I have mixed feelings about driving at night. On the negative side,

it's harder to see where you're going (although using the GPS/navigation map is really helpful to see where curves are coming up);
animals are more active at night – I've had a number of close calls, and have been glad to not have been going too fast; and
you can't see the landscape you're driving through.

On the positive side:

there's not as much vehicle traffic at night;
it's actually easier to see oncoming traffic (because of headlights); and
you wake up in a new place in the morning with a sense of wonder and discovery. It's like you've gone through a portal to Somewhere Else. It's magical.

And yes, I did see three coyotes on this stretch, plus a deer, and an unidentified, slow-moving furry thing that may have been a large raccoon sauntering across the road, and if I hadn't been driving at a sensible speed, I would have hit it. Good thing I wasn't, and I didn't.

Prairie grasses & wildflowers, and the badlands chasm just barely visible in the distance

"Rills" are the formations made in the rock by running water

Dinosaur Provincial Park

From hoodoos to badlands.
Geomorphology is one of the reasons I got interested in geology.

The question of why a landscape looks the way it does, and how it got to be that way, fascinate me.

(I also find it interesting how geology has affected human culture, history and development, but that's another story!)

So we have two areas with two parks — Writing-on-Stone PP and Dinosaur PP — that are not far from each other, separated by fairly featureless prairie and that underwent similar geologic processes (glaciation, stream scouring, water and wind erosion), but have different landscapes.

A few rare hoodoos at Dinosaur PP

At Writing-on-Stone, much of the rock is sandstone. There is some rock underneath that is eroded more quickly, but is still protected somewhat by the harder sandstone caprock.

At Dinosaur, there are hoodoos, too, but in general the landscape is more gently rounded. It is characterized by "rills" where water has eroded the soft siltstone and clay rock. Hoodoos are only found where there is more resistant sandstone caprock, but most of it is gone.

Red Deer River valley

Where the parks are are similar is that they each have a river (the Milk River at Writing-on-Stone; the Red Deer River at Dinosaur PP) now occupying the ancestral valley that was scoured out by glacial outwash. The wide valleys are now prime riparian habitat, occupied by lots of plants and wildlife.

This offers a somewhat startling contrast to the hills above, which are eroding at such a fast rate that plants generally have a hard time staying alive there.

The soil is eroding quickly from this plant's roots

The landforms are a delight to the eye and a wonder to walk in, AND they contain lots and lots of fossils.

Fossils!

Not just dinosaurs, but lots of other fossils as well: mammals, ocean-swimming creatures, amphibians, turtles, lizards, birds, and plant remains and microfossils (pollen).

This area is the RICHEST fossil-bearing area for its size in the world. If you believe the hype, more species have been pulled out of Dinosaur PP than anywhere else.

It's pretty amazing to think about.

Grasshopper

It also helps that the rocks are so accommodating. Because they are eroding so rapidly, new fossils are exposed all the time. (The same thing is happening in the Badlands in South Dakota that I visited last year.)

What scientists know is that 75 million years ago, when dinosaurs were walking the earth, this area was covered by an inland sea. It was bordered on the west with a broad, fairly flat coastal plain that had rivers washing down into it.

What might these footprints tell future researchers?

In these river sediments, they have found complete fossil animals, partially complete fossils, fossils of one type of dinosaur en masse, and "bone beds" — parts of of many types of animals, all mixed up together. They also have found coprolites (fossil fecal matter), fossil tracks, and fossilized eggs.

From these finds, they make inferences about the animals that lived and died here, and also about the weather, which they think might have been responsible for a good percentage of the deaths.

They are coming to think that there were episodic tropical events that unleashed sudden severe floods (think hurricanes), thereby catching dinosaurs unaware, drowning them, and then burying their carcasses. This would account for the types of finds they have discovered.

The complete skeletons are valuable for obvious reasons — all the parts of the animal are there, and pretty much in the order it was left (parts weren't dragged off and consumed elsewhere) or washed away. They assume the animal died, then was rapidly covered by sand or silt before it could be eaten by something else.

Hillside, showing rapid recent erosion

Where many dinosaurs of the same type, but different ages, have died together, they infer that this means the dinosaurs lived together in herds.

Because they have found baby dinosaurs with female dinosaurs, scientist have begun to think that (at least some of them) might have been good parents, not just leaving their eggs to hatch and for the young to fend for themselves.

They look at individual fossil bone parts for signs of predation (gnawed bones). Just like with forensic science today, they can tell if a specimen had an old wound that healed (I can just hear the "Bones" saying, "Yes, the bone shows remodeling..."), or was diseased (think "arthritis").

Hadrosaur attacked by a pack of Deinonychus at the Dinosaur PP museum

There was one amazing find (shown in the Royal Tyrell Museum) where a dead dinosaur washed downstream and caught in the roots of a tree. It was covered mostly, but not all, by sediments. Apparently the parts sticking out were removed (by animals or erosion), but then the entire remains of what was left were covered up and fossilized. When it was discovered and extracted, the tree had been fossilized as well, with the dinosaur skeleton preserved in its roots.

I have read about these theories, but SEEING the really fine specimens that have led to some of these conclusions lends confidence to how they have come up with them.

(But I'm getting ahead of myself. There are a few fossils at the museum here, but the REALLY fine stuff is at the Royal Tyrell Museum. I'm glad I went to the smaller one here first!)

Mud curls

Hiking the Badlands

With most of a day here to explore, I did manage to hike every trail in the park except the "Cottonwood Trail," which is the one that explores the riverside. I'd done a similar one at Writing-On-Stone, and while I would have liked to have done it here, too, it was late in the day, and the mosquitoes were becoming nasty. I didn't thinking a hike down by the river was going to be a good idea!

Cactus flower

I was also glad that it hadn't rained for a few days, as that would have made the trails very slippery. As it was, there was fresh evidence of the previous days' rains (debris, puddles, cracks, and curls). Which is cool, because these features don't last for very long, so I appreciated seeing them.

Unbelievably, there are some places where the water has eroded holes and caves along some of the streambeds. I guess it's because the rock is so soft that where it finds an easy place to go, it just keeps wearing away at it until it makes a hole, kind of like a water drill.

Each successive walk was "the best" and each was a little different. The walk up to a viewpoint was lovely, very few people out there. This one was "inaccessible" when wet, so I was very glad it was dry.

At the end of this hike there is a set of hoodoos known as "Frank the Camel," which is sort of the "logo" hoodoo of the park. I kept walking around looking at it from different viewpoints, trying to see how they got a camel out of it. I guess... sort of... if you squint!

Frank the Camel

Scarlet mallow

The "Badlands" trail takes you off of the scenic driving loop, up in an area that is rigorously controlled: lots of signs saying NOT to go off the established trail, under any circumstances.

It was really pretty country. I brought drawing materials with me on this walk, but it was getting later in the day, and I was afraid I'd get started on something and not be able to finish. I would like to draw from some of the photos I took, but that will be a poor second to actually drawing when there.

On the driving loop, they actually have some exposed fossils IN PLACE. Well, one is in situ, the other is a replica, and they are housed in protective buildings, but still.... It does give you the sense of what it must be like to work on a site to see them right where they were found.

The park actually does have opportunities for the public to help on a dig, but... in July and August. I'm just a little early.

And, actually, I'm not sure that this really would be my thing. Even in a rich area like this, generally what you are finding are little bits of things: teeth and bone fragments. I think I'd just as soon be analyzing things back in the lab, not swatting mosquitoes and sweating in the heat.

(And I'm deeply appreciative that it was such a beautiful day.)