Dr. Don Brinkman, Head Curator, Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

The Royal Tyrrell Museum's 2007 fieldwork season in Dinosaur Provincial Park began in July with a workshop. Nearly 30 researchers and students from several museums and universities working on park material met to share their results and visit field localities.

Dr. David Eberth, Curator of Sedimentology undertook a bone-bed (a mass grave of many individuals, often of the same species) excavation. This site proved to be the first hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) bone-bed documented in the park. His information suggests that like ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs), hadrosaurs had occasional periods when they lived in groups. Dr. Eberth plans to continue with his research of bone-beds in 2008.

Dr. Don Brinkman continued surveying in the park for three weeks in July. His focus was vertebrate microfossil sites and turtle specimens. Good examples of both were located, allowing for further field and lab studies.

Dr. Don Henderson, dinosaur palaeontologist at the museum, spent July and part of August in the park. A result of his work was the collection of a partial skull of Parasaurolophus, a hadrosaur with an elaborate hollow cranial crest protruding from the back of its skull. This rare specimen is only the second skull of this type of hadrosaur collected from the park.

Palaeontological surveys of Dinosaur Park will continue this summer, and with the high rate of erosion and the rich fossil record, we anticipate further exceptional discoveries in 2008.