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long skulls, and at the front of the skull the mouth expanded into a duckbill. A hadrosaurid didn’t have teeth in the front part of its mouth but it had many in the back part of it, a structure that worked well for eating plants. Currie’s find generated enough publicity that people began to know who he was. He went way over budget on his first field outing and, had he not found something noteworthy, he says, he probably would have been laid off.

      The following year, a petroleum company drilling a pipeline in Canada’s prairie badlands found another duckbill dinosaur. Currie convinced a government official to give him some additional summer funding and he started a volunteer programme so he had enough people to help excavate it. Together, Currie and his two technicians, along with four university students and one high-school student, headed to the badlands to dig out the dinosaur.

      ‘It was a good specimen – the part that was exposed,’ Currie says. ‘But as we followed it into the hill, literally moving tons of rock, and we got to the front, suddenly I found one tyrannosaur tooth in the ribs. I thought, uh oh. Then we went further and found another tooth. Then we kept going and found more tyrannosaur teeth and broken bone. So the front end of the skeleton had been eaten off by a tyrannosaur, probably Albertosaurus. The tyrannosaur had bitten through the bone. So we ended up with fragments of the hadrosaur bones and the teeth from the Albertosaurus where it had munched. That was kind of cool, and it did attract attention. It started a cycle.’

      By 1978, Currie and his team were on a dinosaur-finding roll, so much so that the museum eventually ran out of storage space. Currie also arranged an exhibition called ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’, for which he borrowed all the Alberta dinosaur finds from other museums. ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’ broke all attendance records in 1979 and generated reams of publicity for the museum.

      ‘Currie always had it in the back of his mind to create a dinosaur display.’

      The Provincial Museum of Alberta was a government institution and did not accept funding from private sources. The publicity from the finds and the exhibition caught the government’s attention and resulted in officials increasing funding for dinosaur hunting. However, for many years, even though a budget had been established for dinosaur research, when Currie reached the end of the fiscal year he would discover that the funding had been used to plug a hole in the budget somewhere else.

      ‘The politicians were concerned about dinosaur finds in Alberta,’ Currie says. ‘Our task was to prove that we still had the fossil resources and all we needed was manpower and money. We had to work a little bit on people’s pride because it is kind of a strange thing to know that you are really rich in something but to see it you have to go to another part of the world. We played a little bit on both things.’

      Alberta was famous for its dinosaurs, yet it had no centralized place to showcase them. Currie always had it in the back of his mind to create a dinosaur display worthy of the dinosaur resources. At the Provincial Museum of Alberta, he had less than 45 square metres (500 square feet) of space to showcase his finds. ‘It was pathetic that all the biggest dinosaur Alberta displays were somewhere else.’

      His big opportunity came in 1979 when Dinosaur Provincial Park in south-eastern Alberta had become such a hotbed of finds – led by Currie discovering and excavating a Centrosaurus bone bed there – that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dinosaur Park, as palaeontologists know it, covers nearly 19,000 hectares (73 square miles) and has produced more individual skeletons of different dinosaurs than any place of its size in the world. Currie began putting together a planning team to build a museum to showcase Alberta’s dinosaurs that was worthy of a UNESCO site.

      In 1980, with the full support of Alberta Provincial Premier Peter Lougheed, the government agreed to finance a dinosaur museum. However, the museum would not be located in Dinosaur Park, because of the sensitive nature of the site, but nearly 170 kilometres (105 miles) away in Drumheller, a small town of 7,000 located in the heart of Canada’s badlands. Drumheller had been marketing itself as the land of dinosaurs since the 1950s. The town had a small dinosaur museum and several dinosaur-themed parks.

      Currie was asked to submit a proposal for the museum. Knowing that government officials were generally more concerned with the public aspect of a museum than the research side, he outlined several options. One was to put in an interpretation centre in Drumheller – essentially a display without the back-up of a scientific research team on site. For the science, the museum would use palaeontologists in either Calgary or Edmonton, big cities with university-based possibilities for research.

      ‘I wasn’t keen on that because the reality is that displays like that tend to be dead displays in the sense that they are static. All the information comes in second hand, and there’s no real incentive to get things going,’ Currie says. ‘I put the hard sell on: “If you want to do this, you should do it right. You should store collections, have research staff to take care of the material and to collect new specimens, educational staff and the whole works; then you have a living museum.” I also knew the power of publicity. There are two kinds of publicity. One is the kind you pay for and it’s very expensive. As a government organization, we obviously didn’t have the budget for that. And then there is the kind of publicity where you do research and, if it’s interesting, it attracts the media and lets people know you exist.’

      On Christmas Eve 1980, Currie received a phone call and was told the project was going to be the ‘Cadillac version’. In addition to the galleries, it would have a library, study centre and laboratory facilities. Currie made sure the museum had an extensive library, which at that time was a key to attracting top scientists, and a massive storage area that could house the specimens collected and awaiting examination. He was also able to persuade the government to lift its normal rules concerning scientists’ salaries, support staff and facilities. The museum was budgeted at $42 million though, because it was built during the 1981 recession, the final price tag was only $28 million.

      The museum was completed in 1985 and was named after Joseph B. Tyrrell, who had arrived in 1884 on assignment to conduct a geological survey of the Red Deer River. He travelled to the badlands surrounding Drumheller looking for coal, and he accidentally stumbled on the skull of a large carnivore that was later named Albertosaurus. The museum would focus on celebrating the amazing finds that lived in Canada’s prairies more than 65 million years ago.

      On its opening weekend, the Tyrrell Museum drew 30,000 people, and by the end of the first year, it had recorded 500,000 visitors. The dinosaur museum has remained so popular over the years that it has created its own economy and now attracts over $15 million in tourist revenue to the area annually. In 1990, the ‘Royal’ epithet was added, making it one of the most distinguished museums in Canada. ‘Suddenly, tourism started to be talked about in Alberta, and now it’s one of our major industries,’ Currie says. ‘We have people come to Alberta from Europe or Japan and parts of Asia who come specifically to see the Tyrrell Museum.’

      Once the Tyrrell Museum was up and running, Currie was itching to return to the field. He had decided that he did not want to be a museum director. He felt that supervising the building and staffing of the museum would slow his progress as a dino hunter. An interim director supervised construction while a full-time director was sought. Currie served as an assistant director so he could maintain some control over what happened in the research and the collection sides of the museum, but once the museum was fully up and running, he backed out of that role and became nominally attached as Curator of Dinosaurs. ‘I wanted to go out in the field and do research and not be tied to the building giving tours, doing the administration and taking care of people,’ he says.

      In October 2005, he left the Royal Tyrrell Museum to take up the Canada Research Chair in the Biological Sciences Department at the University of Alberta. For him, it was the ideal situation. He would have a base at the university which provided him office space and a laboratory, and he would be free to spend four months a year in the field searching for dinosaurs.

      For Currie, fieldwork has always been the most exciting part of his craft, particularly when he and his team came up with major finds. ‘In Alberta, we excavated two Tyrannosaurus rex and I was very lucky that I was able to do that,’ he says. He laughs at the irony: as a child, he never did get the T. rex action figure in his Rice

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