On the whirlwind tour of Calgary with the daughter, "If you had a father for 8 hours, where would you like to go?" I ask, and she wanted to revisit Drumheller, go searching for dinosaurs in the badlands, relive better memories of her youth, and so after the 7 hour haul from Nelson to Calgary I picked her up from school and we went onward to Drumheller.
It's been a few years, changed a lot, a lot of new twee museums and amusements designed to capitalize on the tourist dollars, the audio/visual museum (??), dunno, a Star Trek museum, which doesn't make sense unless you think of that episode with Captain Kirk and the Gorn, and then it does, and all sorts of other fleeting attractions caught from the corner of our eyes. I'd stop, but our time is limited, we fill up at McDonalds, visit Dollorama for drinks, and then head off into the canyons...
A beautiful day. Not too hot, big Cumulus clouds building in the background, perfect for this...
Walking, a thousand little dead-end canyons to explore, our first real find:
Which, if you look close, is a piece of quartzite boulder napped into the shape of a hide scraper. A native artifact.
Big, the base (bottom) would fill the palm of your hand, the edges obviously shaped: most boulders in these canyons are complete, and better artifacts are found made from better materials, and with clearly better workmanship, but the napping on the edges, several flakes broken off, suggest this was made with purpose. It's a prize.
(Note: That said, I'm pretty bad at mis-identifying things as "Native artifacts" ... and it's very possible this isn't...but, it seems a little too convenient that nature would have napped this boulder several times to produce this flake, hard enough to find a single broken boulder, let alone one that's been broken and broken again. I vote artifact.)
And from here onto other finds:
Dinosaur bone in soil...
Dinosaur vertebrae (left), leg and claw (Right).
***
As always we find dozens of bones, but that's not why were here, it's a competition to find the best skull, get naming rights on a new species, and in our few hours we find nothing we can interest the museum in, but there's always a thousand more canyons to lead us on, and the day is ending too soon, we're just beginning and we have to get back to Calgary for dinner with the boy, I could spend weeks out here, and she's giving me to believe she could too, endless little dead-ends to explore, countless eroding discoveries, and the thought of having to be back to work by tomorrow are killing me, but I'll be back next year with a week or two to kill and then we'll be finding it all...