Phil Currie has devoted much of his 65 years to digging up dinosaur bones and studying them. It’s a passion that dates back to his childhood.
“To me, the exciting thing about dinosaurs is that every time you think you’ve learned something, you end up asking yourself more questions,” said Currie
By piecing together clues buried for millions of years, Currie has helped to uncover how birds and dinosaurs are related, and how dinosaurs lived together in groups.
He’s discovered dozens of dinosaur species and named 25 of his finds. There have been at least seven dinosaurs named in his honour; but he’s so modest, he’s not quite sure of the precise number.
Currie’s research has led him to dig in sites around the world, but much of his work has been carried out right here in Canada.
More specifically, in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, a place that Currie told W5 is one of the richest sites in the world for dinosaur fossils.
“Dinosaur Park has over the last century or so, produced over 700 dinosaur skeletons, plus innumerable bone beds and isolated bones. There are literally millions of bones exposed here at any one time, so it’s a pretty amazing place.”
W5 recently joined Currie on one of his latest digs. It was no easy feat to get there. He kindly offered to escort us down to the site – otherwise we would have never found it ourselves.
Getting to a dino dig
We met Currie and his wife Eva Koppelhus, also a palaeontologist, off a dirt road in the middle of the park. We followed their truck down what could generously be described as a road, down a rocky abyss, and into a wonderland.
Dinosaur Provincial Park may be three hours outside of Calgary, but the landscape is another world away.
When we reached the bottom, we had to go on foot from there. This part of the Park is off-limits to the public, but if someone did manage to make their way to this restricted sector, they would likely never even notice Currie was there.
The dig site was hidden behind a small hill, its existence only visible once you climbed up and over the small but steep rock. And that’s where Currie, Koppelhus and their team of students and volunteers spent nearly two weeks slowly and methodically digging, scraping, and brushing dirt, trying to find fossils.
It’s an incredible part of the country to see, and our cameras were able to take it all in – from an aerial camera, to a GoPro buried in the dirt.
Unearthing ancient bones
It was amazing to watch these explorers searching for clues and buried secrets. It was even more amazing to hear what happened when one of their shovels hit the ground, and actually uncovered a long buried treasure.
Right before our very eyes, Currie and his team found a dinosaur bone that had been lying underground for millions of years. It was magical.
And even though Currie has done this thousands of times before, it’s still magical for him too. “You uncover it, it hasn’t been exposed for 75 million years. Nobody else in the entire world has seen what you’re seeing right now,” he told W5.
Small part of history
Currie said that some of their finds on this dig could actually be a new species of dinosaur, but it will take months of testing in a lab before they know what they’ve got. And he’ll be back again next year to see what else is out there.
“It is tough to come to an area and tear yourself away when you know you’re making great discoveries there and that there’s so much more that you can learn. But it’s a lot easier when you know that a year from now I’ll be back in Dinosaur Park once again,” he said.
It’s not lost on Currie that in the history of the world and the millennia that have passed since dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the years he has spent searching amounts to little more than a blink of an eye. But in that brief time, he has packed in a lot of discoveries, with surely many, many more to come.
“There’s never a day in Dinosaur Park where you don’t find a bone. Never. In fact there are days in Dinosaur Park you are overwhelmed by bones, there are places here where literally you cannot step on the ground without stepping on bone. It’s a totally amazing place.”
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