Canadian Geographic/Showdown at Tumbler Ridge

Showdown at Tumbler Ridge If paleontologist Rich McCrea is right, dinosaur discoveries could be the future of a former coal town in northeastern British Columbia — unless amateur fossil hunters dig out the bones first

By Les l ie Anthony with photogr aphy by M arin a Do dis

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The rugged and remote terrain around Tumbler Ridge, B.C., such as Kinuseo Falls on the Murray River south of town (below) and the nearby boulder gardens (preceding pages), is rich with dinosaur bones and other fossil sites.

— a rusty halo in lighter-coloured rock, the iron-rich artifact of anaerobic decomposition whose presence suggests a higher probability of bone.

Probability plays a huge role in the treasure hunt that is paleontology, and based on experience, analysis and possibly a tad of hubris, McCrea was fairly certain he’d find something when he first prospected here in 2007 with an Italian geologist. “We immediately found a theropod [meateating dino] digit,” he recalls. “A kilometre farther along, I found more bone. It was from the lambeosaur.”

McCrea and Buckley have slowly excavated a work site of some 60 square metres. For four summers, they picked carefully downward at half-centimetre intervals with a hand awl.

By 2009, they knew they were dealing with a partially

articulated skeleton. The animal lies on one side, curling back on its hips, tail pointing away from the slope, while the rest of the body heads under the hillside. A unique ecological feature of the burial emerged early: the highest number of tyrannosaur teeth ever found with another species — almost 50 to date — the majority from juveniles, indicating hyenalike scavenging of the carcass by young tyrannosaurs.

When it comes to scavenging of the lambeosaur, however, McCrea has a greater worry: amateur and commercial fossil hunters, who are propelled by the province’s lack of legislative protection for such sites and are the reason the dig has been so well hidden. “Something about dinosaurs drives people wacky,” says physician Charles Helm, the driving force behind the non-profit Tumbler Ridge

Many notable paleontological surveys of the 19th and 20th centuries in western Canada were accomplished by boat. We aren’t expecting the same kind of wilderness epic, but when you’re plumbing the far reaches of time in a raft on an unexplored river, adventure tends to tag along.

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ich McCrea wants me to pick out the lambeosaur dig site. Standing beside an anonymous hillside, one of thousands in the vastness of northeastern British Columbia, I gaze up and down the heavily eroded slope.

“There,” I say finally, pointing.

“Congratulations,” he replies. “You’re the first visitor to get it right.”

McCrea, who enjoys testing those who think they know too much, has an ulterior motive this time. With his season finished, the dig is protected by buried tarps and disguised with sediment and woody debris to be indistinguishable from dozens of other slumping slopes. McCrea hoped I wouldn’t recognize the spot where British Columbia’s first — and so far only — complete dinosaur skeleton lies waiting to be removed to the Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre in Tumbler Ridge, where McCrea and his partner in pursuits both scientific and domestic, Lisa Buckley, expect to prepare it as the centrepiece of a nascent but already popular Dinosaur Discovery Gallery.

To be fair, I had better-than-average odds. Dual science and journalism credentials include my fair share of paleontological excavations. And I’ve just spent a week in the field with McCrea, being schooled on the fossil riches of the Peace Region, in particular the Wapiti Formation that’s cradling the lambeosaur (a form of hadrosaur, or duckbilled dino, sporting a head crest). I’ve learned how the Wapiti’s secrets are revealed through a combination of downward watercourse erosion and upward weathering; how to isolate, amidst other exposed sediments, potential bone-bearing layers; and how to identify a “fossil stink line”

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Wapiti River, Hadrosaur prints

Quality Canyon

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Museum Foundation (TRMF). “There’s glory and fame in a find, plus the connection with a distant past that we all feel. Some people want to own a piece of that and feel they have the right to remove it. We’re trying to instill that these remains represent knowledge that belongs to the province, the country — everyone.”

As McCrea and I look out from the trees at one of the most bucolic excavations imaginable, he shares an important observation. “We haven’t found bone in this kind of concentration before in British Columbia. We got lucky on this one.”

Lucky, indeed. And for the paleontological aspirations of Tumbler Ridge, that fortuity extends back roughly 230 MYBP (Million Years Before Present), to when the Rocky Mountains to the west were the bottom of an ocean ringing the supercontinent Pangaea and sediments that gathered preserved the remains of countless invertebrates, fishes and marine reptiles, such as the giant ichthyosaurs for which the Peace is renowned. During the mid-Cretaceous and Upper Cretaceous periods, 100 MYBP to 75 MYBP, serendipity covered Tumbler and environs in swampy coastal forest, a massive carbon sink ultimately sequestered in coal beds whose sloughs, beaches and mud flats preserved the footprints and bones of its dinosaur denizens. The final stroke of geologic kismet was reserved for the lambeosaur skeleton: Pleistocene glaciers that scoured this valley missed it by only a metre. And now, some believe, the opportunity residing in this diverse prehistoric fortune might help smooth Tumbler’s boom-­and-­bust sine wave of coal mining by 54

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‘Something about dinosaurs drives people wacky. There’s glory and fame in a find, plus the connection with a distant past that we all feel. Some people want to own a piece of that.’

drove a heavy-duty all-terrain vehicle in with an air compressor that allowed us to work on delicate stuff with [a tool called an] air scribe,” bubbles McCrea as we scramble over a pile of weathered logs and back into the cold gloom of the forest. “A bonus was that the noise of the compressor kept people away. Anyone who got near enough to hear thought it was an oil or gas operation.”

Keeping the public off dig sites is a bugbear for most paleontologists but borders on obsession with McCrea. We backtrack along a circuitous, several-kilometre trail that sees us alternately climbing and skidding down slick hills, wading shin-deep through sphagnum bog and generally heading in any direction other than directly to his truck, itself cryptically hidden so as not to pique the curiosity of passersby.

Short of blindfolding, it’s the easiest way to ensure that I don’t have a clue where we are. But if you think this is paranoia, consider that a single unblemished Tyrannosaurus rex tooth can fetch five figures on the black market; that Sotheby’s, eBay and dozens of dedicated websites trade daily in high-grade fossils; that such rabid commerce has made both legitimate fossil hunting and illegal removal rampant globally; and that located in a jurisdiction with zero formal protection, Tumbler Ridge has already experienced theft and vandalism at two public-access dinosaur trackways.

Framed thusly, McCrea’s precautions seem less than extraordinary. Likewise, his refusal to publicly divulge the location of his latest large-scale dinosaur find — which was national news in the fall of 2010 — lest it draw the attention

Daniel Helm (opposite, at left, with Ben Vadasz) first disovered dinosaur prints in 2000. Paleontologists Rich McCrea and Lisa Buckley (below, from left) have since found theropod prints (above) and much more.

contributing to tourism and other economic initiatives as it has next door in fossil-rich Alberta. Indeed, through contributions to the TRMF, the town has invested more than $1 million in the proposition — money that McCrea, a champion fundraiser, is proud to have more than matched from other sources.

“There’s obvious scientific value in the discovery and preservation of remains,” says Larry White, a three-year mayor of Tumbler Ridge and a museum volunteer who spent a few weeks learning about bone extraction and preparation at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, in Drumheller, Alta. “But there’s also what it means to the town in terms of tourism and basic diversification. You need the science to make the museum a good attraction, and you need the museum in place so that the paleontologists can go out and explore. The province has a lot to gain from something that can ensure the longevity of the town.”

McCrea and Buckley, who’ve made significant commitments of their own, putting down roots and building a museum and research centre from scratch, are two of those crossing their fingers whilst working them to the bone. “We CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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The fear among professional paleontologists is that much has been and will be lost because of cavalier government attitudes that value mining, power and timber over information that should be part of the public trust, allowing private interests free rein to cull fossil deposits. of dinosaur material for British Columbia — and western Canada’s oldest, from a period when land animals weren’t well preserved on a global scale. But there was more.

The canyon cuts through the kilometre-thick Kaskapau Formation, which is about 20 million years older than the Wapiti and contains mostly marine deposits, with some freshwater material and a tiny terrestrial wedge. The severaltonne chunk of sandstone belonged to the latter, a bit of

Charles Helm (above) of the Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation thinks paleontology could set a new course for the community, as long as pros such as Buckley (opposite) get to the bones first. The town’s museum has already outgrown its first home (left).

of unscrupulous amateurs and/or commercial interests. It’s here that the future of Tumbler Ridge leaves science behind to intersect the complex human relationship with fossils.

An organism dies. Lying where it falls, the plant or animal is washed over with sediment, accumulates mineral deposits and is then converted to rock and pushed down into the Earth. Eons later, when this graveyard is exposed through mountain building and erosion, these remnants of ancient life reappear. A human — the only creature for which the distant past appears to have meaning — encounters this fractured forma, recognizing in it not only the long-vanished template of subsequent change but certain relation. Such is the dialectic of a fossil: we don’t go back in time; time comes back to us.

For Tumbler Ridge, a flotilla of hopeful roofs adrift in a sea of skeptical pine some 400 kilometres northeast of Prince George and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Alberta border, fossils are a very reason for existence. The town’s birth mother, the Northeast Coal Project, was the largest single industrial enterprise in British Columbia’s history: the entire model community, railway spur and two mines (the Quintette and Bullmoose) were erected in three years, beginning in 1981. After 17 years of prosperity that saw 65 million tonnes of metallurgical coal extracted and Tumbler’s population peak at 4,500, the ground shifted when diving coal prices closed the Quintette prematurely in 2000. When the Bullmoose completed its lifespan in 2003, workers fled. A housing fire sale attracted mostly retirees and those interested in the region’s tourism potential, but Tumbler limped 56

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through the decade. Then, suddenly, China was coveting coal and driving up prices, enough to spark a second generation of mines. With the Peace’s oil and gas industry also flourishing, the town’s population has rebounded from a low of 1,500 to more than 3,500. Despite a visible scramble to patch up infrastructure built to last only 25 years, Tumbler still resembles a shiny toy village, its history embodied in an enormous coal bucket dropped in the centre of town as if from space. But it’s the whimsy of the paintings on structures throughout town that point the way to a different potential fortune: dinosaurs.

As the good times wound down in 2000, Tumbler lumbered onto the paleontological radar when a string of strange impressions was discovered along Flatbed Creek by Charles Helm’s son Daniel, then age eight, and a friend. As surmised by the boys and later confirmed by McCrea — a specialist in ichnology, the study of trace and track fossils — these were dinosaur footprints, the trackway of a heavily armoured ankylosaur, sparking considerable local interest.

Spearheaded through a hiking club led by the enthusiastic Helm family, residents systematically explored the area.

Additional trackways were found by both amateurs and the now über-intrigued McCrea, who, during a 2001 visit to the Flatbed site, also found a piece of dinosaur bone — the first to be formally identified from the province. Major finds continued to accrue. In 2002, surveying together in a deep canyon along Quality Creek on the town’s northeastern outskirts, prospector Wayne Sawchuk showed McCrea bone he’d spotted in a large sandstone block that had tumbled from the canyon’s rim. Ribs, vertebrae and a fibula were quickly identified, the first significant concentration

ancient river channel into which a diversity of organisms had washed to create a veritable bone omelette. What were the odds of encountering this isolated, oddball stratum, let alone a paleo-treasure chest of dinosaur tracks, the bones of theropods, hadrosaur, ankylosaur, crocodile, turtle, fish, freshwater ray and a mélange of bivalves? McCrea couldn’t say, but he spent the next two summers working on it. The hook was set.

“The foundation applied for $326,000 in funding for a lab and needed a paleontologist to lead it,” he says. “They asked me, and based on the diverse nature of what was being found, it was obvious this was a ground-up opportunity of a lifetime.”

Originally from Saskatchewan and with degrees in biology, education and geology, McCrea took an indeterminate hiatus from his Ph.D. studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton to move to Tumbler Ridge in 2003. He hired Lisa Buckley, born and raised in Rossland, B.C., and similarly papered in zoology, geology and biological sciences, onto the Quality Creek project, where shared aspirations and interests soon found them on a different kind of trackway — marriage.

Together, they worked with federal, regional and community funding sources to establish the surprisingly sophisticated Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre (PRPRC), which has state-of-the-art digital-imaging software for analyzing prints, modern storage, preparation, curatorial and education facilities and a compelling gallery all housed in a decommissioned elementary school. The PRPRC greatly increased understanding of Tumbler’s ancient heritage for both the public and science, a line that isn’t always easy to tread or understand. While the town has been generously supportive, councillors occasionally express reservations, such as being happy to fund a museum but not research, demonstrating lack of knowledge over a museum’s function or the academic brand required to make a museum relevant.

“I’d like to see the research institute given some permanent core funding by either the provincial or federal governments and also by universities,” says Tumbler resident Ryan Murray, consultant to a wind-energy company with which McCrea worked to establish CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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The idea is to float about 100 kilometres along “River X,” which is in the same area that Buckley and McCrea made their big find in September 2010 — 150 kilograms of hadrosaur and theropod bone from a different Wapiti outcrop than the one that served up the lambeosaur. On that trip, the pair spent five days exploring after being dropped by helicopter (they also did a pair of trips on foot). Employing inflatable rafts on this go-round means covering more ground, more cheaply, with more personnel. And there’s abundant precedent: many notable paleontological surveys of the 19th and early 20th centuries in western Canada were accomplished by boat. We aren’t expecting the same kind of wilderness epic, but when you’re plumbing the far reaches of time on an unexplored river, adventure tends to tag along.

After a two-hour drive to a launch site on a side creek, six of us embark. Buckley, McCrea and I man one of the four-metre rafts, each loaded with more than a tonne of gear, while the other holds photographer Marina Dodis, a slugabed husky named Ringo and a pair of volunteer fossil enthusiasts from Fort St. John. Lee Hollen works in the gas industry, and Martin Lavoie is a painter; both are hunters and fishermen who’ve seen plenty of fossils, know the secret locations of giant ichthyosaurs and have extensive rafting backgrounds. Like McCrea, however, they haven’t rafted River X. Very likely, no one has.

Bumping over rocks and around sweepers in shallow rapids, we soon reach a junction with the main flow. While its own fossil-encounter procedures. “I’d love to see all the volunteers’ and paleontologists’ hard work rewarded.”

Research faces at least one other obstruction in Tumbler Ridge: Christianity. Like other rural parts of the province, the Peace has its share of fundamentalism. The PRPRC, in fact, sits adjacent to an evangelical congregation. While it’s impossible to disavow the existence of fossilized bone and teeth from giant, extinct creatures, the storytelling behind them — and the theory of evolution — is another matter.

Open-minded people of faith, including local councillors, have no problem comfortably weaving their own interpretations and happily send their kids to the summer dinosaur camps offered through the PRPRC. Others clearly see it as a threat, and vandalization of signs and track sites has included anti-evolution slogans.

Visiting the Quality Creek site with Buckley and McCrea, I’m first taken by the beauty of staircase pools and waterfalls gurgling down stacks of thin sandstone pancakes. Secondly, I’m struck by the massive bone-block and surrounding footprint casts, one of which shows stunning skin detail. It’s time-travel deluxe. My third impression — as I contemplate plunging to certain but scenic death — is the difficulty of making this find; the ruggedness of terrain, sheer walls and precipitous “trail” required to access the canyon floor, for which a rappel would not be inappropriate. I suggest that it must have been a struggle to haul equipment and samples up and down for the two years they worked the site. They smile in unison. “British Columbia,” says Buckley, “doesn’t give up her fossils easily.”

Hollen and Lavoie enthusiastically set up camp near a fishing hole (and Ringo sleeps), the rest of us hike upstream.

Alternately struggling over slick, bankside rubble and the dense, mossy bush above it during a cold downpour proves tough going — albeit a good introduction to the rigours of dino-prospecting. The cutbanks are extremely dynamic, shedding everything from large boulders to massive clay slumps and mature trees. The potential for a serious accident is huge. The paleos use ice axes to move on the precipitous slopes; Buckley wears a helmet.

Although we see little save for carbonized fossil wood, leaves and cones, particularly compelling are the many contemporary examples of this process: sandy impressions of shorebird feet abutting sediments in which similar-shaped theropod prints are found; chunks of fossilized wood next to a freshly buried log; elk antlers, mossy and weathered, embedded in streamside mud. All reminders that life on Earth is a very long cycle. It’s humbling and edifying.

After a cold night, we graze a spartan breakfast while packing jumbo lunches that might last a week. This time, a half-hour of downstream hiking delivers us to the base of towering outcrops seen from camp. Again, there’s plenty of plant material, but not much else. The going, however, is far easier. Slabs of sandstone mix with glacial overburden below the outcrops, giving way to long stretches of postglacial deposition. The paleos aren’t impressed. “Glaciers really beat this place up,” says Buckley.

A single unblemished Tyrannosaurus rex tooth can fetch five figures on the black market, and Sotheby’s, eBay and dozens of dedicated websites trade daily in high-grade fossils.

The nascent Dinosaur Discovery Gallery (opposite) in Tumbler Ridge’s Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre is already popular. With recent finds such as this hadrosaur being worked on by Buckley (top) and a stunning windfall of dinosaur teeth (right), the gallery has the potential to develop into a major tourist attraction.

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Rounding a bend in the river, we find that a massive rock slide, marked on neither map nor GPS, has choked the river with house-sized boulders, making it impassable. Portaging is unavoidable, the only route a brutal half kilometre of loose talus around the worst of the Deliverance-like rapids.

Just then, however, McCrea recognizes prints in the long, smooth shelf we’re traversing — two enormous hind feet and the accompanying hands of a hadrosaur — fortuitously defined by the rainwater they’ve collected. He measures and photographs the prints and plots the location on his GPS. Then, the find of the day: three small natural theropod casts (the positive, raised outlines of in-filled prints) on a 10-kilogram slab, small enough to transport. McCrea is happy enough to proclaim a reward of wine with dinner.

Next morning, the prospecting trip already a success, we pack up to move camp. But our high spirits last all of an hour. Rounding a bend in the river, we float onto a mini lake whose far end features a suspicious drop in the horizon. A massive rock slide, marked on neither map nor GPS, has choked the river with house-sized boulders, making it impassable. Portaging is unavoidable, the only route a brutal, sloping half kilometre of loose talus around the worst of the Deliverance-like rapids. Our heavy expedition gear isn’t conducive to carrying, even on flat ground, resulting in a six-hour ordeal and dozens of sweaty trips, shins purpled and bleeding from the shifting talus. Once the gear is cached, we line and lift the rafts down, quickly load up and push off, cold, tired and, it turns out, inattentive.

One second I’m paddling, and the next I’m in the air, then submerged in icy rapids, swimming for my life.

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side, drawing my legs into a safe forward position only to be slammed by rocks — butt, thigh, thumb. Finally, I struggle a hand and leg onto the raft, and McCrea pulls me in, beaten and bruised, though how badly is apparent only after the adrenaline drains.

Despite being stiff and full of painkillers, I happily limp along over the next few days while we find bone or prints everywhere we look. We also find some quality coal, using the weightier lumps stranded on gravel bars to stoke massive campfires. It’s around such a blaze, over rum and tea, that Hollen and Lavoie dish excitedly about their big ichthyosaurs. In the case of Hollen’s animal — at 25 metres, perhaps the largest-known — he reached out first to the late Elizabeth (Betsy) Nicholls, at the time the Tyrrell’s curator of marine reptiles. She encouraged Hollen to contact the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, where the person he reached proceeded to call him a thief for having fossil material in his possession. Hollen was taken aback; the accusation was untrue and unnecessary — he was, after all, trying to alert science to the find. Once again, the province’s lack of protection for fossils was to blame.

The fear among professional paleontologists is that much has been and will be lost because of cavalier government attitudes that value mining, power and timber over information that should be part of the public trust, allowing private interests free rein to cull fossil deposits. This isn’t hypothetical: at the McAbee site near Cache Creek, in the B.C.

Interior — one the world’s most important for Eocene fossil insects and plants — commercial fossil hunting, road building and mining for cat-litter production continue. Under pressure from increasing media scrutiny, the government and operators signed a memo of understanding in 2008 stating that the latter wouldn’t release scientifically important fossils to the public. But policing is practically impossible: a friend recently visited McAbee and plunked down $50 to dig fossils with her family. Although well instructed and partially supervised, they were left on their own to remove a box of specimens, most of which weren’t screened.

The scurrilous activity, egomaniacal posturing, political dealing and legal challenges around British Columbia’s fossil issues were enough to spawn a book last year.

Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils, by Prince George author Vivien Lougheed, stands primarily as apologia for the maligned amateur, of which there are many. People like Hollen, who have an interest in fossils, make important finds and contact scientists only to be slighted in their desire for credit or involvement. As the book also documents, however, overzealous amateurs can be an annoyance to time-poor scientists like McCrea, who otherwise happily works with many volunteer keeners, publishes articles on the value of amateur-professional collaboration and engages industry in the Peace on the same front. There are equal

arguments for employing amateurs, who far outnumber pros, as field troops in the quest for valuable fossils, and against, in that untrained individuals can be a liability or motivated by potential profit. The starting point for any resolution is legislation.

Blair Lekstrom, MLA for Peace River South and current Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, supports McCrea’s efforts to close the legislative gap. “The paleontological reserves already unearthed in British Columbia,” says Lekstrom, “indicate that the province should enact legislation to protect these resources for future generations.”

“The writing’s on the wall for a lot of places in the world right now,” adds Canada’s pre-eminent paleontologist, University of Alberta’s Phil Currie. “If you don’t protect the resources, you get destruction or loss because [those resources] are collected and sold off. I think most people recognize that legislation is necessary.” Not only would Currie and other scientists like to see British Columbia take its paleontological resources more seriously, but many have long been surprised that Tumbler doesn’t have a world-class research institute, considering what it has access to and has accomplished. “Creating the institute should, at least in part, be a government responsibility,” says Currie. “Certainly, the resources are a government responsibility.”

Yet Sidetracked questions Tumbler’s suitability to host such a facility, asserting, Chamber of Commerce-style, that a larger town on a main route with a university and more restaurants — i.e., Prince George — is a more logical location to curate, study and exhibit fossils. It seems an odd argument given the history, genesis and popularity of the Royal Tyrrell in Drumheller, a once unknown town that now sees 380,000 visitors annually. Then again, as Tyrrell Paleontologist Rich McCrea (below) and writer Leslie Anthony (left) encountered many obstacles on their river expedition last year (opposite), but the British Columbia government’s lack of protection for fossils is a much bigger challenge.

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The Quality Canyon (opposite) north of Tumbler Ridge was the site of the first significant concentration of dinosaur material found in British Columbia. For McCrea (left), moving to the area represented “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

executive director Andy Neuman says, “It’s a challenge to sustain a major institution within a three-hour radius of more than two million people. It would be a greater challenge in Tumbler Ridge.”

Challenge or not, unlikely help could be at hand. Across the border in tiny Wembley, Alta., the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative (PCDI) is working overtime to realize its own museum and education facility by summer 2013. The PCDI has partnered with Travel Alberta to highlight the fossil resources on the Alberta side of the Peace Region through well-publicized dino digs with celebrities such as Dan Aykroyd and starring turns on major television shows.

You’d be forgiven for thinking, as some Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation board members initially believed, that the dino-museum-game was some kind of competition.

McCrea has since convinced them otherwise. “This concentrates interest in paleontology in the area,” he says, “and that creates both better tourism options and more opportunity for professional collaboration.”

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Outside the museum after surviving our rafting trip, next to several-tonne trackway slabs propped on wooden skids, wide-eyed staffers gather round McCrea’s truck to see what new treasures he’s brought back. Mayor White is here, fresh from thrashing compost in the community garden that occupies the former schoolyard. He traces a finger knowingly over the small theropod prints.

“Paleontology opened up a new perspective for me,” he had told me earlier. “It’s part of our inherent urge to acquire knowledge. Every time these people go out, they come back with more stuff we need to learn about. In the general scope of things, that’s priceless.”

Indeed, everyone is riveted. It’s that dialectic again.

As children, we were impressed wih dinosaurs simply because they were super-sized and supercool (“Barney” notwithstanding). But as we learn more, they morph from giant caricatures of the nature we know into vanguards of the nature we will never know. Lost in the sleepy folds of deep time, dinosaurs are the monsters under evolution’s bed, forever lovable in the mind’s eye.

For some, fascination with this organic machinery turns to consideration of what it took to run it, the ecology that supported it, its legacy of design — folks like the Helm family, White, Hollen and Lavoie, who have seen a corner of their own souls through footprints and mineralized bone and wish to learn more, and people like McCrea and Buckley, whose passion and fastidious studies ultimately give these creatures meaning and gravitas. It would be hard to imagine any community not benefiting significantly should it find a way to value both of these resources.

Whistler, B.C.-based Leslie Anthony has a Ph.D. in zoology and is the author of Snakebit: Confessions of a Herpetologist and White Planet: A Mad Dash Through Modern Global Ski Culture. Photographer Marina Dodis (www.marinadodis.com) lives in Vancouver.

To see a video of the most recent dinosaur expedition near Tumbler Ridge, visit www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/jf12.

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