Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum

The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum sits in Wembley, about 20 kilometres west of Grande Prairie, and is named after the Canadian palaeontologist who oversaw the excavation of the nearby Pipestone Creek bonebed. The building itself is a striking piece of low-slung modernist architecture set against the prairie. Inside, the galleries display articulated skeletons of Pachyrhinosaurus, Albertosaurus and other Late Cretaceous dinosaurs unearthed from the surrounding badlands.

This is one of the most important dinosaur museums in Canada outside of Drumheller, and a worthwhile detour even if dinosaurs are not your usual reason for travel. The interpretive displays do a good job of explaining how the bonebed was formed and what it tells us about herd behaviour in Late Cretaceous ecosystems. Guided tours to the actual Pipestone Creek dig site run in summer. Allow two to three hours; longer if you take the field trip.

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The Pipestone Creek bonebed, which the museum was built to interpret, is one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in the world — somewhere between 100 and 300 bones per square metre across an area the size of several football fields. Almost all of them belong to a single horned dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, named in honour of a local school principal who first reported the site. A herd of thousands seems to have been wiped out crossing a swollen river around 73 million years ago.

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