I’m crouched at a bone bed in Alberta, Canada, armed with a hammer, awl, and brush, attempting to unearth a piece of history 73 million years old. It’s difficult to comprehend the sheer scale of the 181kg Pachyrhinosaurus skull buried beneath me – the remnants of a creature I’ve only ever encountered in fiction.
Dinosaurs remain one of nature’s greatest enigmas. Their sudden extinction continues to baffle scientists, yet evidence of their existence lies scattered across the globe, often just metres below the surface.
The skull I’m carefully excavating belongs to a Pachyrhinosaurus, a close relative of the Triceratops, identifiable by its thick boss and ornate frills. Affectionately dubbed “Big Sam”, this particular fossil was discovered during the filming of the new six-part BBC series, Walking With Dinosaurs – a reboot of the popular show that first aired 25 years ago.
The series aims to breathe new life into these ancient relics, using detailed animatronics and presenting dinosaurs not just as fossils, but as living creatures with emotions and personalities, much like an Attenborough-style nature documentary.
By piecing together clues from the past, Walking With Dinosaurs offers a glimpse into a prehistoric world, revealing the lives of these magnificent creatures.
Liaising with more than 200 palaeontologists, the BBC settled on six distinct stories and dig sites including Spinosaurus, a fierce carnivore found in Morocco, and a Lusotitan in Portugal.
Big Sam’s brethren, belonging to one of the largest herding dinosaur species, are the stars of episode five. Known to science for fewer than 50 years, remains of the creatures were first found at Pipestone Creek Provincial Park.
A 30-minute drive from the town of Grande Prairie, the bone bed is in a boreal forest close to a public trail and was first discovered by a school teacher walking along the creek in the mid-1970s – although proper excavations didn’t take place until a couple of decades later. Guided tours of the site, where work continues, can be arranged by the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum.
“Alberta is famous for bigger dinosaur sites, but this is one of the most important,” says the museum’s curator, palaeontologist Emily Bamforth. “It’s was what put northern Alberta on the map as a palaeontology hotspot.”
It’s estimated up to 40,000 animals could be buried in an area the size of a tennis court, making it one of the biggest collections of individual dinosaurs in the world.
“Millions of years ago, this area would have been marshy and close to the coast,” explains Ms Bamforth, as I chip away at a mille-feuille of overlapping ribs, hips and femurs – commonly known as a ‘bone salad’. “This would have been a great place to be a dinosaur.”
The mass grave resembles a crime scene, with detectives forensically digging for clues in the soil.
“This is a sample size we almost never find in the fossil record,” says Ms Bamforth. “It is a single snapshot of a community of animals from one period in time.”
Theories suggest the animals were moving north as part of seasonal migration, similar to wildebeest following rains through Tanzania’s Serengeti or Canadian caribou heading north to find fresh blooms. But an episode of flash flooding likely stopped them in their tracks.
“Everyone was killed – the old ones, the young ones, the fit ones, the weak ones,” says Ms Bamforth.
“We think that the carcasses were lying out on the floodplain for about a year or two, long enough that the bodies started to decay and fall apart. Then the scavengers started to move in – our big Tyrannosaur, our Albertosaurus, our little feather Dromaeosaurs.”
Excavation and preparation are the most time-consuming aspects of any dig. Once bones have been sufficiently exposed, they are wrapped in a ‘jacket’ of bandages to create a protective cast and carefully removed for further work and analysis.
Back at the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in a glass-screened laboratory viewable to public visitors, Ms Bamforth’s team are working on another Pachyrhinosaurus skull. I watch as they carefully turn the weighty object – heavier than a motorcycle – in readiness to work on part of the fossil last seen when it was removed from the ground 22 years ago.
The amount of information shared by these silent fossils is remarkable. Simply by studying the shape of the skull, Ms Bamforth’s team has deduced detailed characteristics about the animals’ behaviour.
Big eye sockets would have allowed for the eye stabilisation seen in modern herd animals. The purpose of individual frill shapes has also been compared to the unique patterns of zebra stripes used by individuals to recognise one another in a big group.
Stretching far beyond our limited mental capacity, imaging life several million years ago is almost incomprehensible. But bare bones can reveal a surprisingly complex story.
Fleshed out by careful thought, scientific research and a bit of imagination, the struggles, triumphs and daily lives of these ancient creatures are surprisingly relatable. We are, after all, inhabitants of the same home.
Walking With Dinosaurs airs on BBC One and iPlayer on from 25 May for six weeks.
