The Current - Walking with Dinosaurs is back — and Alberta takes centre stage

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Do you have fond memories of Walking with Dinosaurs, the much-loved BBC series that aired back in 1999. If your answer is yes, you and all dinosaur lovers are in luck — it’s coming back this summer, and Alberta is taking centre stage. Matt Galloway talks to Emily Bamforth, the lead scientist of the Pipestone Creek Bonebed in Alberta and a fan of the original series, about how she made her younger self proud — and why the dig is called the “River of Death.”

How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, bound to this. I feel like I'm in hell. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four-part series, I'm going to tell you

why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is, and my plan to fix it. Find Who Broke the Internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Any self-respecting dinosaur lover will recognize that tune and the grumbles and groans that are embedded in it. The beloved BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs aired in 1999 had audiences hooked with its lifelike depictions of the beasts that once roamed the earth. Well now a quarter

century later that series is set to return. This bone here is beautiful. This one is part of the hip structure of a Pachyrhinosaurus. Underneath it this is a second bone possibly a limb bone just based on the shape. More ribs in here. There's another bone right underneath it. Here's another rib that you can see there. That's Emily Bamforth, one of the people who fell in love with dinosaurs at a young age, was fascinated by the original series. In that clip, she is at the River of Death in Pipestone Creek, Alberta. Emily Bamford is the lead scientist at the dig site, as well as the curator at the Philip J. Curie Dinosaur Museum in Wembley, Alberta.

And she has also featured in episode five of the new Walking with Dinosaurs series. Emily, good morning. Good morning. What is it like? I mean, I'm no paleontologist, but I know Walking with Dinosaurs. This is a series that got you interested. What is it like to be mean, I'm no paleontologist, but I know Walking with Dinosaurs. This is a series that got you interested.

What is it like to be in Walking with Dinosaurs? It is a really incredible experience. I remember as a kid, I was one of those dinosaur enthusiasts and I loved Walking with Dinosaurs. It was really the first time that they had brought realistic-like dinosaurs to the big screen in the sense that they were animals and not monsters like in Jurassic Park. And so it is such an incredible thrill to be part of this new series of Walking with Dinosaurs. It's just kind of amazing to think about. Tell me a little bit about this site that we just heard you at.

We think of Alberta and dinosaurs and people will often immediately imagine the Badlands and Drumheller and what have you. Tell us about Pipestone Creek. So the Pipestone Creek Bonebed is just outside the city of Grand Prairie in northwest Alberta. It is, as you say, not a place that people expect to find dinosaurs. But this part of the province is really rich in dinosaurs. We have about the same density of dinosaurs here as in the Drumheller River Valley. However, because we don't have those vast expanses of badlands here, our dinosaurs are a little harder to find. But the Pipestone Creek bone bed is really a classic example

of a northern Alberta dinosaur bone bed. And it's an incredible site. It is extremely dense. So we're looking at something like 100 to 300 bones per square meter in this bone bed. Wow. This is called the River of Death. They don't name it that for no reason. Why is this area known as the River of Death? Yeah. So the Monaco River of Death relates to how we believe the bone bed formed. So we think this is a herd of dinosaurs. The dinosaur in this bone bed is called a Pachyrhinosaurus. It's one of the horned dinosaurs. And we believe that this was a herd on a migration that all died catastrophically in a single event. And the event that we believe

wiped out the animals, our leading hypothesis is that it was a flash flood. So, that's why we call it the River of Death. And this is what, 70 million years ago, 75 million years ago, is that what I read? Lauren 72 million years ago, back in the late Cretaceous period. Pete Yeah. Pete How long have we known about this site and what unfolded there? Lauren So, the Pipestone Creek Bone, but was actually discovered in the 1970s by a high school science teacher from Grand Prairie called Al Acosta. He was walking down Pipestone Creek and he

found the first few bones down in the creek and he followed it up the valley wall and identified the bone deposit. So the the bone beds been collected on and off since the 1980s by the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, by the Graham Prairie Regional College in Grand Prairie. And then when our museum opened in 2015, we took over the excavation. So it is a well-known site up here, but not so well-known elsewhere in the world. So that's one of the exciting things about this series. Pete Can you describe what it looks like? You said that this is one of the largest bone beds in North America. And as you said, I mean, in terms of the concentration per square meter is remarkable. So what does it look like?

So what has been excavated so far at Pipestone Creek is about the size of a tennis court. And the bone bed itself is on the side of Pipestone Creek. It's a fairly steep river valley. So when they first started the excavation back in the 80s, they were literally digging a hole to the side of a cliff. Now the area has been cleared a little bit, so it's a bit of, again, about the size of a tennis court. But they've done drill cores behind the bone bed to see the extent how far the bone bed goes back into the hill, and they were still coming up with bone at that horizon for a squared

kilometer behind where we're excavating. So it has the potential to be an absolutely enormous bone bed, probably one of the biggest in North America. Tell us more about what kind of dinosaurs are there. Is it just one that we know of or a range or what's happening there? So this is a bone bed. We refer to it as a monotaxic bone bed, which means that it primarily contains the one species of dinosaur.

The animal is called a Pachyrhinosaurus. The name means thick-nosed lizard. That's a reference to the fact that instead of having a horn on its nose, like something like a Triceratops, it has this huge bony protuberance that we call a boss. That's really what makes Pachyrhinosaurus unique. They're basically a smaller, older cousin of the T triceratops, but with this really anomalous feature of this big bony bump on their nose. And we think that, and you think, that they were all, the ones there in that area were all wiped out by some sort of flash flood. That's right.

So we believe that this was a, we refer to it as a mega herd. We think this herd contained thousands of animals, up to 10,000, on a seasonal migration. And so we don't know if this one event wiped out the entire species, like likely not, but the species definitely took a hit, because this was a huge herd of animals. Does it complicate your work when a site like this is filled with so many bones? You're not stumbling over them, but in some ways you would be, right? S1 0530 That's right. Yeah. So we refer to excavating at Pipestone Creek. It's amazing. It's a

joy, but it's also a little bit of a nightmare because the bone is so incredibly dense. So if you can imagine trying to excavate a pile of bones, that's sort of what excavating at Pipestone Creek is like. So we have to get very creative about how we are extracting the bones because they're all kind of jumbled up together in one place. However, it is a very reliable bone bed. If we go there, we're absolutely guaranteed to find fossil bones. It's a great site for that reason. What does that creativity look like? So if you imagine we have, it's kind of like a game of pick up sticks where you drop a bunch of sticks and then you're trying to pull them out without disturbing the other

sticks. That's sort of what excavating bones at Pipestone Creek is like. So, you've got to figure out how the bones are overlapping each other, if they're going underneath, if there's bones that go into the really hard rock overlying the cap rock. So, you've got to very carefully figure out how you're gonna isolate these bones so that you can put a field jacket on them and get them out of the ground. What's the one thing,

I mean, I'm sure there's more than one thing, what's the top thing that you are hoping to learn from this site? So the great thing about this site and about paleontology in general is that the more we find out, the more questions we have. So we get some answers, but we generally get more questions. So the thing that makes Pipestone Creek like paleontology gold is that it is a single community

of a single species of dinosaurs from a snapshot in time, and it's a huge sample size. So we can ask things like, how do these animals live in their communities? Did they have parental care? How did they grow? Because we have baby dinosaurs, we have teenage dinosaurs, we have subadult dinosaurs, we've got the big adults. So we have the whole age range of animals preserved in this one site. So we can understand how they grew. And it's really an opportunity to study aspects of dinosaur biology that we can't do if we only find one individual or a couple of individuals, which is usually the case.

And so this bone bed presents an incredible opportunity to study a community of dinosaurs from just one snapshot in time. So there's all kinds of questions we're exploring. We're looking at individual variations. So like what made one animal in this group different from another animal, like in terms of features? So, you know, did they each have different frills?

Did they each have different bosses? Like what made them individual, distinct individuals? Another thing we're looking at is growth. We are really interested in baby Pachyrhinosaurus skulls. And also potentially things like their migration pattern. That's another kind of mystery for us. We know they're migrating, but we don't know where they come from and where they're going, of course, because they are all preserved in this one spot.

So there's lots of different questions that we're exploring. You know that you being in this program is going to inspire some small version of you who's watching this, who wants to be involved in researching dinosaurs and is going to see you and hear you talk about this on Walking with Dinosaurs and think, I could do that. Yeah, and I'm very, very excited about that. As a child, I was incredibly into dinosaurs. Dr. Philip Curry was my childhood hero when I was a kid.

So he's also the namesake of our museum. And I'm also really, really excited to be featured as a woman in paleontology. So I'm hoping that will inspire girls and young women who are interested potentially, not only in going into paleontology, but going into science. Like, yes, yes, you can do this. Like women can do this as well.

So that to me is very important as well. That's awesome. And the fact that you're doing something that, as you said, you find answers and it immediately presents more questions, which is a gift. Emily, it's great to talk to you. Thank you very much. Yeah, no problem. Thank you.

This has been The Current Podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.