Dawson (center) survey party in northern B.C., 1879.
So you wanna be a dinosaur hunter? Even today, hunting for dinosaurs can take you to some very isolated, off-the-beaten-path locales. Deep in the badlands of S.E. Alberta, Iceland, or up in the Yukon. Places, potentially, without much for roads.
But let’s go back to 1875. Roads? What roads? A trading post with food exists every few hundred miles – and to get there you are usually riding a horse, walking, or paddling up a river – tough, grueling work that needs stamina, strength, and self-reliance. Living off the land is not for sissies! Now, imagine you stand less than five feet tall, with a back deformity from tuberculosis of the spine which constantly gives you pain, and you are tasked with exploring thousands of
miles across the prairies and the Rocky Mountains of Western Canada. Would you be up for it? His physical issues didn’t stop George M. Dawson, one of the heroes of the European ‘age of exploration’ in the Canadian west. The tiny dynamo was renowned both for his mental prowess and his physical endurance, often staying in the field during winter months when other, lesser, men went home to huddle by the fire. Among his many discoveries were the first dinosaur bones in the west in what is now the province of Saskatchewan, followed by more in Alberta’s Milk River region. His finds were eventually identified as duck-billed Hadrosaurs. The many specimens collected by Dawson were to form the core of the department of vertebrate palaeontology of the present National Museum of Natural Sciences.
8 | Enter Our Photo Contest
