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Boning up on the badlands
Joseph Tyrrell — early Canadian explorer
If he was still alive, Joseph Tyrrell might call the third week of June, 1884, one of the luckiest of his life.
Tyrrell was a surveyor with the Geological Survey of Canada, and in the summer of 1884, set out on an expedition of
Alberta's badlands. On June 9, he found the skull of an unidentified dinosaur in
Red Deer Valley — the Albertosaurus — now considered one of the most important paleontological discoveries in North America. Three days later, he found one of the largest coal deposit in Canada near what is now Drumheller, Alberta.
A B.A. graduate from the University of Toronto, Tyrrell was 26 at the time of these discoveries
and had no formal geological or paleontological training, and little field experience. Despite his inexperience,
Tyrrell was on the path to becoming one of Canada's most respected explorers and geologists.
In 1893, Tyrrell led the first of two monumental expeditions across the Barren Lands — from Lake Athabaska to Hudson's Bay — covering over 5,000 kilometres by paddle and foot. These expeditions produced some of the first accurate maps of the region, over half of which was previously uncharted.
In 1899, Tyrrell left the Geological Survey of Canada to search for gold in the Yukon. Based in Dawson City until 1905, he searched for gold throughout the Klondike, staking claims on Sourdough Hill, Hunker Creek, Bonanza Creek. Later, he applied his golden touch to the mines of northern Ontario. In 1924, he became the managing director of the fledgling Kirkland Lake Gold Mine. The mine's gold source was almost depleted, but Tyrrell insisted that new sources of ore could be found by digging deeper. Tyrrell's geological intuition made him a millionaire: between 1926 and 1960 the Kirkland Land Mine produced $40 million worth of additional gold.
Joseph Tyrrell died on August 26, 1957, just short of his ninety-ninth birthday.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology opened in Drumheller in 1985, and was named in honour of Tyrrell — the discoverer of Dinosaur Provincial Park's prized Albertosaurus.
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