WITH A DENTIST’S PLAQUE REMOVER in one hand and a coarse brush in the other, I carefully expose the chocolate-brown remains of a young Centrosaurus apertus — a prehistoric rhinoceros — while a couple of steps away, my boyfriend uncovers an eye socket the size of a baseball.

I’ve come to southeastern Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park to channel my inner Indiana Jones while chiselling a small role in a bonebed study spanning 30 years of research. After seven hours in the field, my mind is reeling from the meticulous work involved in deciphering the evidence these titanic creature have left behind.

“Watch your step,” warns paleontology technician and program coordinator Marie Tounissoux as she guides us to Bonebed 30, our excavation site. “You don’t want to damage any bones.”

It sounds like an overzealous warning from someone who has spent too many hours with her nose in a textbook. It’s not. We descend into a small quarry, past hoodoos layered like stacks of caramel and chocolate ice cream, on a trail littered with fossils, which range from smaller than fingernails to dino-sized femur bones.

Looking at the desiccated landscape, where prickly pear cacti and birds of prey thrive, it’s hard to fathom that around 75 million years ago, these badlands were a subtropical coastal plain along a giant inland sea. Paleontologists theorize that regular storms flooded the flat Florida-like landscape, drowning scores of dinosaurs and depositing sediments that preserved at least 35 different species for us to discover.

Since last summer, thanks to the efforts of Tounissoux, Dinosaur Provincial Park is offering the country’s only dinosaur excavation program available to the public, with one-day to three-day excavations taking place from June 19 to September 26. Participants prospect for new fossils, learn proper digging and fossil removal techniques, and contribute to ongoing research on ceratopsian bone beds under the watchful eye of Tounissoux. “The fossil resource should belong to everyone,” she says. “We all should be able to benefit from it.”

For more information, please go to www.dinosaurpark.ca and click on the “Programs & Events” link.

— Candice Vallantin

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