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travel / great places / explorer / ja05
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Boning up on the badlands
All about albertosaurus
Picture a Tyrannosaurus rex: a 7,000 kilogram monster-predator, measuring five metres at the hip, 12 metres in length, with a set of 60 banana-sized bone-crushing teeth. Now picture a smaller, leaner version: the albertosaurus.
Albertosaurus roamed Alberta's Red Deer River region 76 million years ago, using its flesh-slicing teeth to dine on the late Cretaceous period's cohort of plant-eating dinosaurs. A close relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, albertosaurus was not so heavily built as its cousin. While both dinosaurs moved on two legs, T.rex would have dwarfed the 1500-kg, three-metre tall albertosaurus had they lived during the same era (T.rex ruled the Earth some 9 million years later).
Still, albertosaurus lived up to the Tyrannosaurid family name: it was, indeed, a tyrant. Longer-limbed than the T.rex, and possessing enormous hind claws, albertosaurus was a swift, mobile hunter and scavenger, pursuing its prey at speeds of up to 40 kilometres per hour. Its teeth were not adapted for chewing, but were saw-edged, allowing the albertosaurus to slice into its catch — perhaps a tasty Corythosaurus — swallowing chunks of meat whole, much like modern-day lizards.
Albertosaurus bones were some of the first to be discovered in Alberta. In 1884, Joseph Tyrrell, a surveyor with the Geological Survey of Canada, found an intact dinosaur skull near Drumheller, Alberta. There were no dinosaur experts in Canada at the time, so the specimen was sent to a professor in Philidelphia, who indentified it as a Laelaps incrassatus. But in 1905, the same year that Alberta became a province, Henry Fairfield Osborne of the American Museum of Natural History proposed that the skull belonged to a new species. The specimen was named after the place where it was found — albertosaurus, or "reptile from Alberta".
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Interested in seeing the Albertosaurus skull unearthed by Tyrrell in 1884? It's part of the Canadian Museum of Nature's permanent collection in Ottawa, but is on loan to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta until December 2005.
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