DINOSAUR PARK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 September 1943, Page 4

DINOSAUR PARK

IN WESTERN CANADA WEALTH OF PRE-HISTORIC REMAINS. RELICS OF ONCE TROPICAL AREA. (By Fergus Hoffman, in the “Christian Science Monitor.")

RED DEER, Albert—Here in the heart of the Canadian West is a little known Dominion Park, almost a souvenir of the pre-historic Mesozoic Age, which should become a major tourist attraction after the war when motorists head northward toward Edmonton and the beginnings of the Alaska Military Highway. It is Dinosaur Park, virtually an open air museum of ancient fossil remains in the Alberta bad Iftnds of the Red Deer River Valley, 88 miles north of Calgary. The Red Deer bad lands have been famous among paleontologists , and geologists since 1884, when a Dominion mining expert, J. B. Tyrell, stumbled into the welter of sweltering coulees, wind-eroded ravines and shale cliffs and serrated plateaus in search of coal. Instead, he found the world’s greatest repository of dinosaur remains. Some of the gigantic bones protruded from the earth; excavation revealed still others.

The park area, 400 feet deep and two miles across from plain to plain, still is a treasure house of fossils of horned dinosaurs which grew to a length of 30 and 40 feet and stood as high. Some of the specimens uncovered were armoured, some carnivorous. They were of many different types—amphibian, vegetarian, nomadic. Many unknown facts about the life habits of dinosaurs were disclosed as investigation continued in the bad lands.

This is what geologists believe happened—at least 50,000,000 years ago: during the saurian dynasty there were great changes in climatic conditions. In this pre-glacial age when the Rocky Mountains had not yet been formed the dinosaurs inhabited a tropical jungle. Hot winds swept from the Pacific across the teeming steaming swamps and swales. A huge inland sea reached from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic. Then the weather changed —a process which took centuries—and the quicksands of the inland sea acted as preservatives for the dinosaurs which perished in them. Now this ancient wealth is Dominion property. Fossils may not be removed without permits; park wardens patrol the area. Even now visitors occasionally pry loose one of the fossil oysters and find a pearl. Petrified figs semiprecious stones and leaf impressions testify to the tropical nature of the area in the Mesozoic Age. C. A. F. Jungling a pioneer resident of the district has made a hobby of collecting the fossils of the valley and his farm home is one of the show places of the park area. He has thousands of specimens under glass and frequently has guided government and museum authorities in search of new fossils of an extinct age. A. Y. Jackson, one of Canada's foremost painters and a member of the almost. forgotten "Group of Seven,” once called the Red Deer "the most paintable valley in Western Canada." The grotesque, eerie panorama which the wind has wrought with the aid of the centuries still is a favourite attraction for touring artists and sculptors and should lure camera experts when pleasure travel is resumed.