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Proactive disclosure Print version   | |  PaleoGallery GSC's Jurassic (and Cretaceous) Park
"I enjoyed every minute of my work. If I had life to live over again I'd be a dinosaur expert..." The above quotation from Charlie Sternberg is a reminder that the GSC has had its share of dinosaur collectors. The Canadian dinosaur hunt began in 1874 when George M. Dawson discovered fragments and large bones of duckbill dinosaurs in what is now southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. George Dawson returned to the west in 1881 with an assistant, Richard G. McConnell (later Deputy Minister), and collected even more dinosaur bones. As Director, George Dawson returned yet again to western Canada, this time with Thomas Chesmer Weston and Joseph Burr Tyrrell. T.C. Weston, a lapidary, spent much of his later years as a fossil collector who worked all across Canada. J.B. Tyrrell, well-known for his exploration of western Canada, discovered the rich dinosaur-bearing sedimentary deposits of the Red Deer River valley in 1884. The first dinosaur skull he found was a skull of Albertosaurus, a carnosaur from the Late Cretaceous age (the geologic time period which follows the Jurassic Period). This creature was just a bit smaller than the better known Tyrannosaurus. The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, located in Drumheller, Alberta, is named after this accomplished explorer from the Geological Survey of Canada. Lawrence Lambe continued Weston's work in western Canada beginning in 1897. Lambe discovered a number of new dinosaur genera and species over the next few years, and spent much of his time preparing the fossil galleries of the GSC's museum. This museum needed more and better dinosaur fossils, especially complete skeletons, and so the fossil collecting Sternberg family became associated with the GSC. Charles H. Sternberg, and his sons George, Levi and Charles M. (Charlie) all worked for the Survey. Charlie was later transferred to the GSC's offspring, the National Museum of Canada. The Sternberg field party of 1923 included a student, Loris S. Russell, who later worked as a GSC vertebrate paleontologist for several years before joining the Royal Ontario Museum in 1937. The Victoria Memorial Museum became a separate departmental branch in 1920, but shared staff and facilities with, and was financially controlled by, the Survey. It became the National Museum of Canada in 1927, but it wasn't until 1947 that it became functionally separate from the GSC. At that time, the Survey's vertebrate paleontological work became a responsibility of the Museum, leaving the GSC with invertebrate paleontology and paleobotany. This division of responsibility more or less continues to this day. The dinosaurs discovered by these early explorers are now at the Canadian Museum of Nature. The invertebrate and plant fossils they also found and studied remain today in the collections of the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa.
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