Latest news with #PipestoneCreek
CBC
22-05-2025
- Science
- CBC
Digging towards a massive find
Finding fossils is very common here in Alberta. But what isn't as common is finding a site with thousands of preserved dinosaurs. Just southwest of Grand Prairie, Alta., in Pipestone Creek, a dinosaur mass grave is being uncovered. Emily Bamforth is a paleontologist and curator at the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum.
Asharq Al-Awsat
20-05-2025
- Science
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Mystery of Dinosaur Mass Grave at Canada's 'River of Death'
Hidden beneath the slopes of a lush forest in Alberta, Canada, is a mass grave on a monumental scale. Thousands of dinosaurs were buried there, killed in an instant on a day of utter devastation. A group of paleontologists have come to Pipestone Creek - appropriately nicknamed the 'River of Death' - to help solve a 72-million-year-old enigma: how did they die? According to a report by BBC, trying to work out exactly what happened there starts with the hefty strike of a sledgehammer. Brute force is needed to crack open the thick layer of rock that covers what Professor Emily Bamforth, who's leading the dig, described as "palaeo gold." As her team begins the more delicate job of removing the layers of dirt and dust, a jumble of fossilized bones slowly begins to emerge. The fossils in the small patch of ground that the team are working on are incredibly tightly packed. Bamforth estimates there are up to 300 bones in every square meter. Thousands of fossils have been collected from the site, and are constantly generating new discoveries. Paleontologists believe the dinosaurs were migrating together in a colossal herd for hundreds of miles from the south - where they had spent the winter - to the north for the summer. Paleontologist Jackson Sweder is particularly interested in what looks like a chunk of dinosaur skull. 'Most of what we find here is a duck-billed dinosaur called Edmontosaurus. If this is a skull bone, this is a dinosaur that's large - probably 30ft (10m) long,' he said. Sweder is the collection manager at the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum in nearby Grande Prairie, where the bones from both of these giants are taken to be cleaned up and analyzed. He is currently working on a huge Pachyrhinosaurus skull that's about 1.5m long and has been nicknamed 'Big Sam.' All the evidence suggests that this catastrophic event was a flash flood - perhaps a storm over the mountains that sent an unstoppable torrent of water towards the herd, ripping trees from their roots and shifting boulders. 'We know, every time we come here, it's 100% guaranteed we'll find bones. And every year we discover something new about the species,' said Bamforth. As the team packs up their tools ready to return another day, they know there's a lot of work ahead. They've only just scratched the surface of what's here - and there are many more prehistoric secrets just waiting to be revealed.
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Solving the mystery of a dinosaur mass grave at the 'River of Death'
Hidden beneath the slopes of a lush forest in Alberta, Canada, is a mass grave on a monumental scale. Thousands of dinosaurs were buried here, killed in an instant on a day of utter devastation. Now, a group of palaeontologists have come to Pipestone Creek - appropriately nicknamed the "River of Death" - to help solve a 72-million-year-old enigma: how did they die? Trying to work out exactly what happened here starts with the hefty strike of a sledgehammer. Brute force is needed to crack open the thick layer of rock that covers what Professor Emily Bamforth, who's leading the dig, describes as "palaeo gold". As her team begins the more delicate job of removing the layers of dirt and dust, a jumble of fossilised bones slowly begins to emerge. "That big blob of bone right there is, we think, part of a hip," Prof Bamforth says, watched on by her dog Aster - whose job today is to bark if she spots any nearby bears. "Then here, we have all of these long, skinny bones. These are all ribs. And this is a neat one - it's part of a toe bone. This one here, we have no idea what it is - it's a great example of a Pipestone Creek mystery." BBC News has come to Pipestone Creek to witness the sheer scale of this prehistoric graveyard and see how researchers are piecing together the clues. Thousands of fossils have been collected from the site, and are constantly generating new discoveries. The bones all belong to a dinosaur called Pachyrhinosaurus. The species, and Prof Bamforth's excavation, feature in a new landmark BBC series - Walking With Dinosaurs - which uses visual effects and science to bring this prehistoric world to life. These animals, which lived during the Late Cretaceous period, were a relative of the Triceratops. Measuring about five metres long and weighing two tonnes, the four-legged beasts had large heads, adorned with a distinctive bony frill and three horns. Their defining feature was a big bump on the nose called a boss. The dig season has just started and lasts each year until autumn. The fossils in the small patch of ground that the team are working on are incredibly tightly packed; Prof Bamforth estimates there are up to 300 bones in every square metre. So far, her team has excavated an area the size of a tennis court, but the bed of bones extends for a kilometre into the hillside. "It's jaw dropping in terms of its density," she tells us. "It is, we believe, one of the largest bone beds in North America. "More than half of the known dinosaur species in the world are described from a single specimen. We have thousands of Pachyrhinosaurus here." Palaeontologists believe the dinosaurs were migrating together in a colossal herd for hundreds of miles from the south - where they had spent the winter - to the north for the summer. The area, which had a much warmer climate than it does today, would have been covered in rich vegetation, providing abundant food for this enormous group of plant-eating animals. "It is a single community of a single species of animal from a snapshot in time, and it's a huge sample size. That almost never happens in the fossil record," says Prof Bamforth. Bigger beasts offering clues And this patch of north-western Alberta wasn't just home to Pachyrhinosaurus. Even bigger dinosaurs roamed this land, and studying them is essential to try and understand this ancient ecosystem. Two hours drive away, we reach the Deadfall Hills. Getting there involves a hike through dense forest, wading - or doggy-paddling in the case of Aster - across a fast-running river, and clambering over slippery rocks. No digging is required here; super-sized bones lie next to the shoreline, washed out from the rock and cleaned by the flowing water, just waiting to be picked up. A huge vertebra is quickly spotted, as are bits of ribs and teeth scattered across the mud. Palaeontologist Jackson Sweder is particularly interested in what looks like a chunk of dinosaur skull. "Most of what we find here is a duck-billed dinosaur called Edmontosaurus. If this is a skull bone, this is a dinosaur that's large - probably 30ft (10m) long," he says. The Edmontosaurus, another herbivore, roamed the forests like the Pachyrhinosaurus - and is helping palaeontologists build up a picture of this ancient land. Sweder is the collection manager at the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum in nearby Grande Prairie, where the bones from both of these giants are taken to be cleaned up and analysed. He is currently working on a huge Pachyrhinosaurus skull that's about 1.5m long and has been nicknamed "Big Sam". He points to where the three horns should be at the top of the frill, but the one in the middle is missing. "All the skulls that are decently complete have a spike in that spot," he says. "But its nice little unicorn spike doesn't seem to be there." Throughout years working at the extraordinary site, the museum team has collected 8,000 dinosaur bones, and the surfaces of the lab are covered in fossils; there are bones from Pachyrhinosaurus of every size, from young to old. Having material from so many animals allows researchers to learn about dinosaur biology, answering questions about how the species grows and the make-up of the community. They can also look at individual variations, to see how one Pachyrhinosaurus could stand out from the herd – as may be the case with Big Sam and his missing spike. A sudden devastating event All of this detailed research, in the museum and at the two sites, is helping the team to answer the vital question: how did so many animals in Pipestone Creek die at the same time? "We believe that this was a herd on a seasonal migration that got tangled up in some catastrophic event that effectively wiped out, if not the entire herd, then a good proportion of it," Prof Bamforth says. All the evidence suggests that this catastrophic event was a flash flood - perhaps a storm over the mountains that sent an unstoppable torrent of water towards the herd, ripping trees from their roots and shifting boulders. Prof Bamforth says the Pachyrhinosaurus wouldn't have stood a chance. "These animals are not able to move very fast because of their sheer numbers, and they're very top heavy - and really not very good at swimming at all." Rocks found at the site show the swirls of sediment from the fast-flowing water churning everything up. It's as if the destruction is frozen in time as a wave in the stone. But this nightmare day for the dinosaurs is now a dream for palaeontologists. "We know, every time we come here, it's 100% guaranteed we'll find bones. And every year we discover something new about the species," says Prof Bamforth. "That's why we keep coming back, because we're still finding new things." As the team packs up their tools ready to return another day, they know there's a lot of work ahead. They've only just scratched the surface of what's here - and there are many more prehistoric secrets just waiting to be revealed. The new series of Walking With Dinosaurs starts on Sunday 25 May at 18:25 BST on BBC One, with all episodes available on BBC iPlayer. Dinosaurs Science & Environment
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
A T-rex with lips? Predators with pink eyebrows? Walking with Dinosaurs is back to challenge everything you know
I've been under work pressure many times before, but nothing has prepared me for this. In Alberta, Canada on a palaeontology dig being filmed for the return of the BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, I have been allowed to unearth a dinosaur bone. It has not seen the light of day for about 73m years, and now, armed with just a hammer, awl and brush, I am chipping away at the rock around it to bring it to human eyes for the first time. One tap too hard in the wrong place and the fossilised bone could break. Fortunately, I'm guided by more than just my recollections of the archaeology series Time Team. Overseeing me at Alberta's Pipestone Creek Bonebed is leading Canadian palaeontologist Emily Bamforth, one of the advisers on the revival of WWD – the hit turn-of-the-millennium series which recreated extinct species through CGI and animatronics. The bones we are excavating, Bamforth says, are thought to have been caused when a flash flood or fire engulfed a herd of horned, herbivore dinosaurs (found only in North America) called Pachyrhinosaurus. As if the poor creatures hadn't suffered enough, they now have me trying to unearth them. At first it is hard to differentiate between rock and remains. But Pipestone Creek Bonebed has one of the densest concentrations of dinosaur bones in the world, up to 200 bones per square metre. The prehistoric graveyard contains an estimated 10,000 creatures that will take more than a century to excavate – so it is not long before the 'bone salad', as one of the dig team calls it, is apparent. Fortunately, with Bamforth's guidance (and while humming the Jurassic Park theme tune under my breath) I complete my task without breaking anything. I then watch her team expertly remove a large bone from the ground using a plaster 'jacket' to protect it during its journey to be cleaned and analysed in a laboratory at the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum where Bamforth is curator. Her work, and that of more than 200 palaeontologists around the world, has helped inform the look of the new WWD, with their discoveries informing the dinosaurs' behaviours and appearance on screen. A lot has changed since the Kenneth Branagh-narrated series first aired in 1999, including the fact that many people now believe dinosaurs, like dragons, did not actually exist. WWD showrunner Kirsty Wilson explains that talking to people while travelling during the two years of filming, she realised, 'so many people … used to seeing [dinosaurs] in Jurassic Park etc … think of them as mythical animals'. One taxi driver even asked her if dragons are real. Whether our post-factual world, AI or the popularity of TV series such as House of the Dragon are to blame, who knows? But Wilson hopes this series will disabuse people of that notion. She says whereas the original WWD 'was purely visual special effects and animatronics [with] no dig sites involved at all, this time around, we're … doing our homework for the audience to see. We wanted to feature the real science that goes on.' Focusing on one individual dinosaur in each of the six episodes – now narrated by actor Bertie Carvel – is another difference from the 1999 original. This will, Wilson says, 'bring to life really cracking stories that will keep everybody engaged. What we really hope is that people will be emotionally involved with these animals as real animals.' They range from a single dad Spinosaurus – the largest carnivorous dinosaur to walk the earth – to a lovesick, herbivore Lusotitan. Thomas says the genesis for reviving WWD was its 25th anniversary plus the runaway success in 2022 of a show she worked on called Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough, which used a prehistoric graveyard to tell the story of the demise of the giant reptiles. Wilson explains: 'We wanted to bring back WWD and tap into that nostalgia, legacy, and all the things that made the series so brilliant, but also completely reimagine it … bring it up to date and do something new and exciting with it.' That includes the latest thinking about some dinosaurs' appearance, which might prove a huge surprise. In the Currie Museum's lab and collection, Bamforth and WWD assistant producer Sam Wigfield show me some of the fossils of leaves, skin, teeth and bone that have changed palaeontologists' view of dinosaurs. 'In our Tyrannosaurus rex episode, the T rexes have lips, which is not a Jurassic Park feature because they want to show off all the teeth. But actually the growing consensus is they had lips, which is less Hollywood, but more scientifically accurate,' says Wigfield. As well as showing that various dinosaurs were feathered, the reptiles will also be depicted in a much more exciting range of skin tones than the previous brown or green. 'In the natural world we see a vast array of very bright colours,' says Bamforth. 'We worked with palaeontologists and experts to introduce flashes of colour … So we have Albertosaurus – terrifying predators – with pink eyebrows.' To make the show more realistic, the computer-generated dinosaurs have been put against real-life locations similar to their own habitat. Crew members like Wigfield and production manager Emma Chapman acted out the parts of the creatures using cutouts, tape measures and tennis balls on poles so every move could be worked out. They even used pizza boxes on their feet to smooth over their tracks to save having to pay VFX specialists to 'wipe out' their prints on screen. Chapman – who has been instrumental in making the show's logistics work – recounts another trick used to save VFX money: 3D-printing a giant blue screen dinosaur head to get the right ripples in water. Getting moving water to look natural is expensive, so a 2-metre model of a Spinosaurus head was made and shipped to the filming location in Portugal. But she says even that was quite challenging, 'because the director wanted it to sink, because a Spinosaurus swims. So we were in a swimming pool, burrowing holes in it to try to get this thing to sink!' Due to fans' love for the first series, there is 'added pressure', says Chapman, but after the release of the trailer, excitement is building among fans of the original – many of whom now have children and will bring a new generation to what Thomas calls the 'BBC's iconic intellectual property'. With its worldwide appeal (the first series was watched by 700 million viewers globally) WWD is likely to make the Philip J Currie Museum a TV tourism hotspot, particularly as it is offering 'palaeontologist for a day' trips to go on a dig. Speaking after my dig, Bamforth says she is 'hopeful' WWD will make dinosaurs 'more real for people' who may 'struggle to understand that dinosaurs were real in the sense that animals today are real. It's so long ago and they're so alien to anything we have today.' Walking with Dinosaurs airs on BBC One and iPlayer on 25 May
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Walking with dinosaurs: Mystery of Pachyrhinosaurus mass grave in Canada
Hidden beneath the slopes of a lush forest in Alberta, Canada, is a mass grave on a monumental of dinosaurs were buried here, killed in an instant on a day of utter a group of palaeontologists have come to Pipestone Creek - appropriately nicknamed the "River of Death" - to help solve a 72-million-year-old enigma: how did they die?Trying to work out exactly what happened here starts with the hefty strike of a force is needed to crack open the thick layer of rock that covers what Professor Emily Bamforth, who's leading the dig, describes as "palaeo gold".As her team begins the more delicate job of removing the layers of dirt and dust, a jumble of fossilised bones slowly begins to emerge. "That big blob of bone right there is, we think, part of a hip," Prof Bamforth says, watched on by her dog Aster - whose job today is to bark if she spots any nearby bears."Then here, we have all of these long, skinny bones. These are all ribs. And this is a neat one - it's part of a toe bone. This one here, we have no idea what it is - it's a great example of a Pipestone Creek mystery."BBC News has come to Pipestone Creek to witness the sheer scale of this prehistoric graveyard and see how researchers are piecing together the of fossils have been collected from the site, and are constantly generating new discoveries. The bones all belong to a dinosaur called Pachyrhinosaurus. The species, and Prof Bamforth's excavation, feature in a new landmark BBC series - Walking With Dinosaurs - which uses visual effects and science to bring this prehistoric world to animals, which lived during the Late Cretaceous period, were a relative of the Triceratops. Measuring about five metres long and weighing two tonnes, the four-legged beasts had large heads, adorned with a distinctive bony frill and three horns. Their defining feature was a big bump on the nose called a dig season has just started and lasts each year until autumn. The fossils in the small patch of ground that the team are working on are incredibly tightly packed; Prof Bamforth estimates there are up to 300 bones in every square metre. So far, her team has excavated an area the size of a tennis court, but the bed of bones extends for a kilometre into the hillside."It's jaw dropping in terms of its density," she tells us."It is, we believe, one of the largest bone beds in North America."More than half of the known dinosaur species in the world are described from a single specimen. We have thousands of Pachyrhinosaurus here." Palaeontologists believe the dinosaurs were migrating together in a colossal herd for hundreds of miles from the south - where they had spent the winter - to the north for the area, which had a much warmer climate than it does today, would have been covered in rich vegetation, providing abundant food for this enormous group of plant-eating animals."It is a single community of a single species of animal from a snapshot in time, and it's a huge sample size. That almost never happens in the fossil record," says Prof Bamforth. Bigger beasts offering clues And this patch of north-western Alberta wasn't just home to Pachyrhinosaurus. Even bigger dinosaurs roamed this land, and studying them is essential to try and understand this ancient hours drive away, we reach the Deadfall Hills. Getting there involves a hike through dense forest, wading - or doggy-paddling in the case of Aster - across a fast-running river, and clambering over slippery digging is required here; super-sized bones lie next to the shoreline, washed out from the rock and cleaned by the flowing water, just waiting to be picked up.A huge vertebra is quickly spotted, as are bits of ribs and teeth scattered across the mud. Palaeontologist Jackson Sweder is particularly interested in what looks like a chunk of dinosaur skull. "Most of what we find here is a duck-billed dinosaur called Edmontosaurus. If this is a skull bone, this is a dinosaur that's large - probably 30ft (10m) long," he Edmontosaurus, another herbivore, roamed the forests like the Pachyrhinosaurus - and is helping palaeontologists build up a picture of this ancient is the collection manager at the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum in nearby Grande Prairie, where the bones from both of these giants are taken to be cleaned up and analysed. He is currently working on a huge Pachyrhinosaurus skull that's about 1.5m long and has been nicknamed "Big Sam". He points to where the three horns should be at the top of the frill, but the one in the middle is missing. "All the skulls that are decently complete have a spike in that spot," he says. "But its nice little unicorn spike doesn't seem to be there."Throughout years working at the extraordinary site, the museum team has collected 8,000 dinosaur bones, and the surfaces of the lab are covered in fossils; there are bones from Pachyrhinosaurus of every size, from young to material from so many animals allows researchers to learn about dinosaur biology, answering questions about how the species grows and the make-up of the community. They can also look at individual variations, to see how one Pachyrhinosaurus could stand out from the herd – as may be the case with Big Sam and his missing spike. A sudden devastating event All of this detailed research, in the museum and at the two sites, is helping the team to answer the vital question: how did so many animals in Pipestone Creek die at the same time?"We believe that this was a herd on a seasonal migration that got tangled up in some catastrophic event that effectively wiped out, if not the entire herd, then a good proportion of it," Prof Bamforth the evidence suggests that this catastrophic event was a flash flood - perhaps a storm over the mountains that sent an unstoppable torrent of water towards the herd, ripping trees from their roots and shifting boulders. Prof Bamforth says the Pachyrhinosaurus wouldn't have stood a chance. "These animals are not able to move very fast because of their sheer numbers, and they're very top heavy - and really not very good at swimming at all."Rocks found at the site show the swirls of sediment from the fast-flowing water churning everything up. It's as if the destruction is frozen in time as a wave in the stone. But this nightmare day for the dinosaurs is now a dream for palaeontologists."We know, every time we come here, it's 100% guaranteed we'll find bones. And every year we discover something new about the species," says Prof Bamforth."That's why we keep coming back, because we're still finding new things."As the team packs up their tools ready to return another day, they know there's a lot of work ahead. They've only just scratched the surface of what's here - and there are many more prehistoric secrets just waiting to be new series of Walking With Dinosaurs starts on Sunday 25 May at 18:25 BST on BBC One, with all episodes available on BBC iPlayer.
