Dev Chat: A Field Day

Hello there! I’m Lindsay, paleontologist by day, writer for Prehistoric Kingdom by night. Just a few weeks ago I successfully defended my Master’s thesis at the University of Alberta, so hopefully I’ll have plenty of time to complete more Paleopedias soon! At UAlberta, I was privileged to be part of several amazing summer field crews, including field work with Phil Currie and Eva Koppelhus this past June. The following report summarizes a day in my life as a paleontologist amongst their field crew in the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

June 24, 2025 was a beautiful day in the badlands! No rain on the radar, gentle winds, and lots of sun. I dressed in my field fashion best for a day of prospecting on private land just outside Dinosaur Provincial Park. Phil and Eva have great relationships with several local farmers who allow their field crew to prospect for and collect fossils on their land every year. We also have permits from the provincial government that allow us to paleontologize as we see fit. Alberta’s fossil heritage laws are strict and comprehensive, so you must have a permit to collect fossils!

A paleontologist has to carry a lot of gear on any given day. Below, you’ll see an assortment of the gear I have stuffed in my various field packs. From left to right: we have an awl, a bottle of glue (dissolves in acetone if needed), field tags (gotta collect locality data), a rock hammer, a dental pick (good for cleaning the bone surface), a paint scraper (great for mud!), a trowel, and a paintbrush (for sweeping away debris). This isn’t to mention other necessities like paper towels for cushioning specimens and rolls of plaster bandages for making support jackets. Oh, and water. Lots and lots of water.

For today’s travels, I buddied up with my fellow grad student Jordan Stock (pictured below). He’s a jack-of-all-trades, acting as a paleobotanist, paleoecologist, and tyrannosaur paleontologist whenever the opportunity arises. We started our day at a “microsite,” which is a bonebed that almost exclusively preserves tiny fossils. This means we spent a lot of time on our butts, staring at the ground.

To give you a bit of scale, here’s a standard dental pick (also called a scraper or a sickle probe) amongst some ironstone pebbles and fossil fragments. The fossils are generally a lighter color than the ironstone, because they’ve been bleached by the sun. We found a lot of interesting things at this microsite, including fish scales, dinosaur teeth, champsosaur vertebrae, and the teeny-weeniest little mandibles I’ve ever seen.

We stayed at the microsite through lunch. After we ate, Jordan and I ditched the tiny bones in favor of prospecting for some bigger ones. “Prospecting” involves hiking around promising rock exposures in hopes that you’ll find new bone exposed at the surface. We followed a nice layer of rock along a steep slope, keeping an eye out for things that might have rolled downhill. The view of the badlands was quite lovely. I got Jordan to pose for a photo with the awesome backdrop.

Lo and behold, we did find some chunks of weathered bone at our feet! They must have tumbled down from a higher layer. Most of them seemed to be centra from hadrosaur vertebrae. Can you pick them out amongst the ironstone in the photo below? Fossil fragments tend to look more porous than the surrounding rocks.

We scrambled uphill, following the trail of bones to find where they had eroded from. Here Jordan is investigating a large hadrosaur limb bone, about 6 meters (20 feet) up from the initial find. Not far away, I found a flat, fragmentary bone eroding out of the same horizon. It was probably part of a girdle (pectoral or pelvic), but it was simply too broken to tell. With so many bones coming from the same spot, we may have found an associated hadrosaur skeleton! Unfortunately, they were in such poor condition that there was nothing we could do but abandon them. It’s heartbreaking, but that’s the nature of field work in Dinosaur Provincial Park; there are so many amazing things to collect that we have to be quite picky. Otherwise, we’d run out of storage space!

Now, I couldn’t bring a paleobotanist along without showing you some fossil plants! These slabs came from the same horizon as the hadrosaur bones. We lovingly call finds like this “coal slaw” or “plant hash.” It’s the remains of conifer needles and other similar plants, fossilized in one big jumble of coal.

One of the biggest hazards out here are actually the modern plants: cacti! Just a day later, I sat on a prickly pear (ye-ouch). All the cacti were beautiful this year, though; they were loving the recent rain, and were all blooming. I particularly like the bright purple flowers of the pincushions, seen below.

Other hazards in the badlands include sinkholes, slippery slopes, rattlesnakes, scorpions and spiders, the deadly laser that is the sun, and the darn ironstone (I managed to rip my pants while sitting in sharp ironstone approximately five minutes before the aforementioned prickly pear incident). Despite all the risks at hand, you couldn’t ask for a more beautiful place to work.

Before meeting the rest of the crew back at the trucks at the end of the day, Jordan wanted to make a mad dash to the next hill. There are always more fossils on the other side, or so the saying goes. I decided to sit and have a snack while he ran over, but kept an eye out the whole time. It’s important that we use the buddy system out here, re: sinkholes and such.

Once we met up with the others, Phil took us out for ice cream, and then we went back to our trailers in Dinosaur Provincial Park proper for showers and dinner. After a long day of prospecting and collecting, we generally wind down the night by cataloging all the day’s specimens so we have them numbered in our system. But today was a little unusual, because the Field Station was hosting a talk for campers to learn from real paleontologists. And I was one of the speakers! I presented a short talk on my Master’s research. It was a rewarding end to the field day, even if it wasn’t the norm.

That just about wraps up my day! I hope this was a fun diversion from the usual behind-the-scenes content. Field experiences like today’s help inform how I write Nigel’s dialogue and the Paleopedias, as well as the advice I’ve offered about game features like events that impact dig site yield. I feel really lucky that I’m able to bring my expertise to the public in such a fun and engaging way by participating in Prehistoric Kingdom development. Thank you for supporting our project!