Hey there! I did a similar post last year about Dinosaur Provincial Park, which I didn't go to this year. Instead I headed north to Grand Prairie, Alberta, which is sitting on Campanian rocks from the Wapiti formation, dating to ~73 MYA. The area's claim to fame are incredibly rich bonebeds of Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, herding Ceratopsids which are thought to have died en masse while attempting to cross a flooding river. I was digging at Pipestone Creek, which in places is really more bone than rock. Trying to expose one bone to map and collect it was very difficult, because you'd find 5 other bones on top and underneath that you would also have to map, collect, or move out the way before you could get to the one you wanted in the first place.
Here's a picture of the area of the bone bed I worked in. I roughly outlined the bones in red; at the top there's a rib fragment, the largest one is an ilium (I have a penchant for finding pelvic bones), the smallest is a tooth, and the one beneath that is a phalanx (finger bone). And actually, looking at it now, there's an epoccipital (the small nubby bones that lined the outer edge of the frill in Ceratopsians) that I forgot to ouline sitting between the rib and the illium. There was also a nice layer of coal right above the ilium which took around 3 days to remove, simply because there was so much bone in the way.
Grand Prairie Bonebed by Isotelus, on Flickr
This is a hind limb ungual (toe bone) that I found and plopped on my hiking boot for scale.
This is a beautiful tyrannosaurid tooth that another member of the crew found. I had also found another larger but less complete tooth nearby, but it shows that predators were coming to these rivers and having a grand feast on the carcasses that managed to wash up on shore. On rare occasions, dromaeosaurid teeth can also be found.
Grand Prairie Bonebed by Isotelus, on Flickr
This is to give an idea of how packed with bones this place is. On the left is a vertebra, which is on top of a rib, which was on top of a number of other ribs and bone fragments, and which is resting against my best find; the triangular shaped bone in the top right corner. I found it in the last half hour on the last day when I was taking out a shale layer to make sure the bed could drain when it rains. I uncovered a small portion of it, and if you look closely you can kind of make out it's rough, bumpy texture. Because we couldn't make out its overall shape, we thought it might be a femur or calcaneous, or a piece of skull bone. It turned out to be the latter, which is the best you can hope for, apart from a whole skull or articulated skeleton. It's a predentary (the lower beak) that belonged to a juvenile and luckily had one of two processes preserved (usually none are left).
Grand Prairie Bonebed by Isotelus, on Flickr
So there you have it. Dinos galore. There are more pictures on my Flickr if anyone is interested, including a picture of my lower half covered in mud (I found it amusing). Thanks for reading
Here's a picture of the area of the bone bed I worked in. I roughly outlined the bones in red; at the top there's a rib fragment, the largest one is an ilium (I have a penchant for finding pelvic bones), the smallest is a tooth, and the one beneath that is a phalanx (finger bone). And actually, looking at it now, there's an epoccipital (the small nubby bones that lined the outer edge of the frill in Ceratopsians) that I forgot to ouline sitting between the rib and the illium. There was also a nice layer of coal right above the ilium which took around 3 days to remove, simply because there was so much bone in the way.
Grand Prairie Bonebed by Isotelus, on Flickr
This is a hind limb ungual (toe bone) that I found and plopped on my hiking boot for scale.
This is a beautiful tyrannosaurid tooth that another member of the crew found. I had also found another larger but less complete tooth nearby, but it shows that predators were coming to these rivers and having a grand feast on the carcasses that managed to wash up on shore. On rare occasions, dromaeosaurid teeth can also be found.
Grand Prairie Bonebed by Isotelus, on Flickr
This is to give an idea of how packed with bones this place is. On the left is a vertebra, which is on top of a rib, which was on top of a number of other ribs and bone fragments, and which is resting against my best find; the triangular shaped bone in the top right corner. I found it in the last half hour on the last day when I was taking out a shale layer to make sure the bed could drain when it rains. I uncovered a small portion of it, and if you look closely you can kind of make out it's rough, bumpy texture. Because we couldn't make out its overall shape, we thought it might be a femur or calcaneous, or a piece of skull bone. It turned out to be the latter, which is the best you can hope for, apart from a whole skull or articulated skeleton. It's a predentary (the lower beak) that belonged to a juvenile and luckily had one of two processes preserved (usually none are left).
Grand Prairie Bonebed by Isotelus, on Flickr
So there you have it. Dinos galore. There are more pictures on my Flickr if anyone is interested, including a picture of my lower half covered in mud (I found it amusing). Thanks for reading
