I was out again last Sunday. It was raining when I got there but I could see it was passing, so I dug through my golf bag for my rain jacket, put it on and went down the slope. The dizziness of the day before was gone. The sun was out by the time I got to the valley floor and the jacket went into my backpack. The plan was to poke about a little in the same valley as the day before and then maybe, head one valley over. I ended up doing them in reverse because I overshot the entrance of the first. Several seasonal creeks spill into the Red Deer and, with apologies to those truly winsome little stream beds, they all look a little alike. Plus, when you peer up the channel from the riverbank you can’t see into what you are about to explore. You must enter first, which is also how life works I suppose. The riverbank is several feet below the creek beds, and the valley entrances are often narrow and guarded by brush.
Passing up on to the stream bed past the bushes is also a little exciting. Like entering an undiscovered valley, as in a scene from Lord of the Rings or the famous fantasy novel about a group of sailors in a lost-land encountering dinosaurs, The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs (his best- known work was Tarzan of the Apes). Ah yes, boyhood memories, but let’s move on from fantasy and fiction to fact. It’s certainly a fact that I should have perhaps noted the valley entrance by GPS location, but it was not a big deal. I was just out for a bony ramble. I’m ahead the moment I put on my hiking boots.
I passed through a clump of willows and entered the valley. It’s always a tad thrilling to cover new ground, wonder what walked there, and uncover clues of an ancient un-civilization. Everyone of these small valleys is marked and divided by a stream bed, almost always dry, but still overflowing with promise. They bend, rise, drop, and twist every few metres, so every step is a new vista and a new opportunity. But, alas, this water channel was, as water channels go, a bit clueless. I didn’t find any bone. I hopped up and went up the south side of the valley ridge hillside to explore ledges but without luck, so I kept climbing to the ridge top and headed east and up toward a hilltop guarded by prominent sandstone bluffs.
I had spotted them in the distance the day before. Now they were calling to me. I didn’t have much choice. When you are summoned by the gods of the rocks, or nature herself, you go. It’s a command performance.
The bluffs are unusual in the badlands for being taller than most, laid down in thick strata of sandstone and the colour of raw honey. They cap and guard a high hilltop, protecting it from the elements. Wind and water have eroded the surrounding ridge, which is now 30 feet lower. The valley floor is, perhaps, 120 feet below. On top, they overwatch all that spreads out before them, a role they have played without rest or even blinking, since being carved from the surrounding landscape by water, ice, and stone, 20,000 years ago.
I crossed from the bluffs along the ridge further eastward to a plateau that extended back to the river valley hillsides. It is an area of several acres, a rain and snow catch basin, that feeds the smaller valleys that lay between the ridges, and that empty into the Red Deer. I crossed the plateau to the next valley over and started down to another water channel. The going got steeper so I turned around to face the hillside, reached down blindly for footholds, and used my screwdriver to stab into the hill to help support my weight. At one point, a bentonite handhold gave way and I slid, leaving raspberries on both forearms. Then it was down and across the water channel. Then back to the other side. Then down in it. Then back out. They pull me along and my eyes strain to make sense of every new site around every bend: the hundreds of pieces of ironstone, sandstone, glinting minerals, glacial till, roots, plants, strata, undulations, sloughs, arches and, often enough, traces of the past.
I neared the bottom of the channel and popped up the side of the ridge and over to the next valley. That was a good decision. The hunting was much better. For example, I found the bone you see below in the water channel. I can’t say who precisely it belonged to. There’s no name on it. But a solid-boned ornithischian it seems, likely a hadrosaur, but there were other ‘ornies’ too who lumbered through here, such as ceratopsians like Anchiceratops, a 16 foot long, three-horned bulldozer (see below) that looked like triceratops.
The first Anchiceratops ever discovered was found in 1912 by a party led by the famous dinosaur hunter, Barnum Brown. It now resides in the American Museum of Natural History in New York though, for the record, it’s Canadian. There were many other species of ornithischians that munched away on the Drumheller area vegetation back then, hunted of course by theropods. Perhaps someday I’ll see if I can find a complete list of species discovered to date.
And where in that big body did it come from? Was it from a femur? A humerus? I thought about this while resting at the mouth of the stream bed you see below, hydrating and eating a banana before heading up hill and home. My entire anatomical training comes from that little ditty about the knee bone being connected to the shin bone, etc. I suspect I will need to know more to make sense of the bones of the badlands.
Oh, and I have an update on this finding of a couple of weeks ago.
The folks at the Royal Tyrrell seem to think the above is likely a bison skull and have referred the matter to a quaternary paleontologist at the Royal Alberta Museum.
In case this lingo is new to you (I learn it five minutes before I pass it on to you) the quaternary is a period of the Cenozoic era, the time following the dinosaurs, otherwise known as the Age of Mammals. I have no idea if he’ll be interested in what is probably an old bison skull. I’ll let you know when I know.