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Past stories Living off-the-grid New Brunswick's Saint John River Ontario's Bruce Trail Canadian Ski Marathon Elk Island National Park Rallying for rallysport Montreal - Circus city Beluga Bytes Dawson - a musical adventure Bald Eagle Confederation Trail Boning up on the badlands Ukkusiksalik National Park Geocaching Discover Cypress Hills Saint Joseph's Oratory A walk through Stanley Park Sudbury's science centre Acadia continues Toronto's underground world

When Joseph Tyrrell discovered the skull of an albertosaurus in Alberta's badlands in 1884, he'd stumbled on a great dinosaur graveyard — the largest of its kind in North America. Over a century later, 300 complete skeletons from 35 different dinosaur species have been unearthed from Dinosaur Provincial Park, a 7,493-hectare protected zone of badlands and prairie, located 200 kilometres east of Calgary.

Opened in 1955, the United Nations designated Dinosaur Provincial Park a World Heritage Site in 1979 because of the area's unique terrain, riverside habitat and its high concentration of fossils and bones from the late Cretaceous period.

In 1985, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology opened two hours northwest of the park in Drumheller, Alberta. This meant that bones and fossils (previously shipped to museums elsewhere for analysis and display) could remain in the province. Today, the museum houses over 110,000 specimens of prehistoric life, and continues to excavate in the park.