one of a select group of full-time dinosaur palaeontologists in North America. The museum wanted Currie to undertake fieldwork, stage exhibitions and handle education and research. Currie couldn’t have been more motivated. But when he arrived, he discovered that his annual budget was a scant $4,000 – less than the cost of collecting a single dinosaur find. The struggle for research and fieldwork funding began immediately.
Dinosaurs are big and therefore logistically expensive to remove, and for years the financial resources weren’t readily available. The Second World War had wiped out money for most scientific research, and when funding recovered it was funnelled first into medical sciences. Though the public was hungry for information about dinosaurs, the funding simply wasn’t there. Research money went first into fossil fish, small fossil mammals, and anything connected to human origins and the ‘missing link’. For years, palaeontology found itself at the end of a long line, and by the late 1970s there were no more than a dozen full-time dinosaur palaeontologists in the entire world.
‘The large museums like the American Museum of Natural History and the Royal Ontario Museum felt that they already had their wonderful dinosaur displays,’ Currie says. ‘They felt they didn’t need any more, so why should they hire a dinosaur palaeontologist to do it? But the public still loved it. That kind of worked against us too – other scientists would say dinosaurs are popular in the public as kind of a gee-whiz thing, and why should we do research on dinosaurs when they are extinct?’
But the dinosaur renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s changed things. Leading palaeontologists John Ostrom and Dale Russell, followed by Ostrom’s students, Peter Dodson, Jim Farlow and Bob Bakker, were all working on ideas concerning dinosaurs as living animals and discussing them in terms the layperson could understand. ‘Things started to turn around when you started to get a few palaeontologists who were studying dinosaurs and made some rather special finds,’ Currie says. ‘The finds weren’t all that unique, but the way they marketed them was different. These were biologists rather than geologists, so they were looking at things differently.’
As the dinosaur renaissance was getting into its stride, Currie arrived at the Provincial Museum of Alberta in 1976 and staged his own mini-revolution in dinosaur research in Canada. Despite his limited budget, Currie dedicated himself to fieldwork. The odds were against him. The Alberta museum had been looking for years and hadn’t found anything interesting. Many palaeontologists believed that the eastern museums had already taken all the good specimens and there were none left.
There was also the issue of time and manpower. Dale Russell had done a study of the field notes of dinosaur hunters like Barnum Brown working in Alberta from 1910 to 1924 and calculated that, on average, during the golden period when major dinosaur discoveries were being made, it had taken about four man-months of walking to find one good specimen. Therefore, if you had four people searching, it would take one month to find a dinosaur. Currie had just one other person helping him and they would be in the field for only a month. What they needed was some luck.
Currie forged ahead with great determination. He knew early success was critical, and he had some. In his first year, near the Canada–US border, Currie collected a hadrosaurid, or duckbill dinosaur. Based on fossilized footprint evidence, duckbills walked around mostly on their hind legs and would go down on all fours whenever they were feeding. The biomechanics of their bodies also indicated that they weighed too much to support themselves full time on their hind legs. They had very long skulls, and at the front of the skull the mouth expanded into a duckbill. A hadrosaurid didn’t have teeth in the front part of its mouth but it had many in the back part of it, a structure that worked well for eating plants. Currie’s find generated enough publicity that people began to know who he was. He went way over budget on his first field outing and, had he not found something noteworthy, he says, he probably would have been laid off.
The following year, a petroleum company drilling a pipeline in Canada’s prairie badlands found another duckbill dinosaur. Currie convinced a government official to give him some additional summer funding and he started a volunteer programme so he had enough people to help excavate it. Together, Currie and his two technicians, along with four university students and one high-school student, headed to the badlands to dig out the dinosaur.
‘It was a good specimen – the part that was exposed,’ Currie says. ‘But as we followed it into the hill, literally moving tons of rock, and we got to the front, suddenly I found one tyrannosaur tooth in the ribs. I thought, uh oh. Then we went further and found another tooth. Then we kept going and found more tyrannosaur teeth and broken bone. So the front end of the skeleton had been eaten off by a tyrannosaur, probably Albertosaurus. The tyrannosaur had bitten through the bone. So we ended up with fragments of the hadrosaur bones and the teeth from the Albertosaurus where it had munched. That was kind of cool, and it did attract attention. It started a cycle.’
By 1978, Currie and his team were on a dinosaur-finding roll, so much so that the museum eventually ran out of storage space. Currie also arranged an exhibition called ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’, for which he borrowed all the Alberta dinosaur finds from other museums. ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’ broke all attendance records in 1979 and generated reams of publicity for the museum.
‘Currie always had it in the back of his mind to create a dinosaur display.’
The Provincial Museum of Alberta was a government institution and did not accept funding from private sources. The publicity from the finds and the exhibition caught the government’s attention and resulted in officials increasing funding for dinosaur hunting. However, for many years, even though a budget had been established for dinosaur research, when Currie reached the end of the fiscal year he would discover that the funding had been used to plug a hole in the budget somewhere else.
‘The politicians were concerned about dinosaur finds in Alberta,’ Currie says. ‘Our task was to prove that we still had the fossil resources and all we needed was manpower and money. We had to work a little bit on people’s pride because it is kind of a strange thing to know that you are really rich in something but to see it you have to go to another part of the world. We played a little bit on both things.’
Alberta was famous for its dinosaurs, yet it had no centralized place to showcase them. Currie always had it in the back of his mind to create a dinosaur display worthy of the dinosaur resources. At the Provincial Museum of Alberta, he had less than 45 square metres (500 square feet) of space to showcase his finds. ‘It was pathetic that all the biggest dinosaur Alberta displays were somewhere else.’
His big opportunity came in 1979 when Dinosaur Provincial Park in south-eastern Alberta had become such a hotbed of finds – led by Currie discovering and excavating a Centrosaurus bone bed there – that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dinosaur Park, as palaeontologists know it, covers nearly 19,000 hectares (73 square miles) and has produced more individual skeletons of different dinosaurs than any place of its size in the world. Currie began putting together a planning team to build a museum to showcase Alberta’s dinosaurs that was worthy of a UNESCO site.
In 1980, with the full support of Alberta Provincial Premier Peter Lougheed, the government agreed to finance a dinosaur museum. However, the museum would not be located in Dinosaur Park, because of the sensitive nature of the site, but nearly 170 kilometres (105 miles) away in Drumheller, a small town of 7,000 located in the heart of Canada’s badlands. Drumheller had been marketing itself as the land of dinosaurs since the 1950s. The town had a small dinosaur museum and several dinosaur-themed parks.
Currie was asked to submit a proposal for the museum. Knowing that government officials were generally more concerned with the public aspect of a museum than the research side, he outlined several options. One was to put in an interpretation centre in Drumheller – essentially a display without the back-up of a scientific research team on site. For the science, the museum would use palaeontologists in either Calgary or Edmonton, big cities with university-based possibilities
