Alberta Safari


East Alberta

If you travel on safari in East Africa, you are likely to encounter ferocious beasts in the wild. Leopards, lions, and elephants are fascinating, but if you want to experience much larger and far more dangerous predators, you should consider East Alberta.



We packed a lunch and filled the Jeep’s tank with dinosaurs, a.k.a. gasoline. Petroleum is fossilized organic material – 200-million-year-old zooplankton and dead Tyrannosaurus Rex – so our first encounter with a prehistoric beast happened at Fas Gas.

Massive creatures continued to cross our path as we drove eastward, big squishy grasshoppers made a mess of the Jeep’s grill and windshield. Before we reached Highway 2, our view was littered with locusts.




We left the Trans-Canada highway at Bassano and picked our way along secondary roads to our destination, Dinosaur Provincial Park.

The badlands that encompass the Park have produced 5% of the world’s fossilized dinosaur species. Bear and I hope to encounter a few on our safari field trip.




This juvenile Gorgosaurus was having a snack just inside the Interpretive Centre as we arrived.  The 75-million-year-old predecessor of T-Rex had an estimated adult weight of about 10,000 lbs.



Gorgosaurus was dining on the drumsticks of a Citipes elegans, a smaller fleet-footed herbivore.  


Our next encounter was with Alberta Lizard. Three quarters of known Albertosaurus fossils have been found in outcroppings on the banks of the Red Deer River. The large bipedal dinosaurs hunted in packs.

We were very fortunate to capture this photograph of Alberta’s namesake reptile, as they hunted in the coulees of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

Albertosaurus hunting Saurolophus, with a pair of nervous Struthiomimus watching.

The horns and head frill of the Chasmosaurus are problematic for paleontologists.  Chasmosaurus was a docile herbivore, with no need of offensive armaments.  Scientists speculate that the short horns and spectacular, but flimsy head frill would not have provided much protection.  The facial attributes of Chasmosaurus might have given the appearance of size and strength, thereby deterring potential predators.



Our Alberta safari lasted until the sun started to drift behind the hoodoos.  Faced with the prospect of being in the dark with the most ferocious monsters the world has ever known, we turned the Jeep around and headed home.

An unfortunate victim of an …

… Alberta Safari.



2 Responses

  1. Gervais

    Nice piece about our local megafauna. Did you look in the mirror too? 😉

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