Phil Currie continues to break ground in his hunt for dinosaurs

From Calgary Herald: Phil Currie continues to break ground in his hunt for dinosaurs
DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK - Phil Currie has climbed up and down the sandstone cliffs of Alberta’s badlands so many times over the past 30 years that even on this icy day in December, the lanky 62-year-old paleontologist nimbly leaps from one slippery slope to another without breaking stride.

Seemingly fit students and colleagues quickly fall behind rather than risk breaking a leg in one of the many hidden sinkholes that make this hike hazardous, even when there is no snow.

Currie hasn’t had time to put on fat or lose his agility since he named his first newly discovered dinosaurs in 1979 (Amblydactylus kortmeyeri was a hadrasaurid that had left its footprints in the mud of a now-submerged section of the Peace River canyon).

In 2010, he and his wife Eva Koppelhus, a palynologist who studies pollen spores and other organic matter that can provide insights into the dinosaur’s environment, found themselves on every continent, including Antarctica, where they were part of a team that unearthed a new species of bird-hipped dinosaur dating back 190 million to 200 million years.

Neither Currie nor Koppelhus can remember a year when they weren’t in the field for weeks — sometimes months — at a time, fending off masked fossil poachers in the deserts of Mongolia, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, assessing the relationship between dinosaurs and Komodo dragons in Indonesia or rubbing shoulders with celebrity volunteers such as Dan Aykroyd and Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the fossil-rich Pipestone Creek region of northwestern Alberta where a new dinosaur museum will soon bear Currie’s name.

“I figure we’re on the road about 50 per cent of the time on digs, attending conferences or giving lectures,” says Currie, who is looking tanned and relaxed after a 10-day visit to Thailand that resulted from an invitation from the country’s queen. “It can be wearing at times, but it’s a life that we’re used to. I still enjoy it.”

Currie is here today to meet a Calgary-based helicopter pilot who is going to airlift the 350-kilogram hip bone of a Daspletosaur that had to be left behind last summer because it was too heavy to carry out with the skull, ribs and other fossilized bones that went with it. The dinosaur was discovered by a podiatrist from New York who spotted the foot of the creature protruding from the sand.

Daspletosaur is a direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus. Although not quite as big, it was still at the top of the food chain when it lived in western North America between 74 million and 77 million years ago. Currie is especially pleased about this discovery because it is only the second Daspletosaur ever found in the Oldman Formation of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Few articulated dinosaur fossils are found in this formation close to the river bed.

With a little time to spare before the chopper arrives, Currie leads me to the site of another extraordinary find I saw a few days earlier when I visited his lab at the University of Alberta. The specimen is so rare and so exquisitely preserved that even Currie, modest as he is, acknowledges it will make a huge splash when he reveals its identity in a leading scientific journal in a year or two.

Currie ranks it right up there with the dinosaur eggs that were found in southern Alberta and with the rare, 10-metre-long Gorgosaur unearthed in Dinosaur Provincial Park and now displayed at the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.

When reminded about the herd of tyrannosaurs he dug up at Dry Island in the Alberta badlands in the late 1990s, Currie pauses and smiles; the discovery of as many as 15 Albertasaurus specimens bunched in one spot all but confirmed his then-controversial theory that some tyrannosaurs were not necessarily solitary creatures, as many people had thought.

Many were very social animals that travelled and hunted together, as this herd apparently did before they all died unexpectedly in some natural catastrophe.

“That was memorable,” Currie acknowledges. “But it was Barnum Brown who made the discovery in 1910. All I did was the detective work at the Museum of Natural History in New York that led us back to that forgotten quarry in 1996.”

Currie says he’s a lucky man who tends to be in the right place at the right time. But a theologian might argue there must have been some divine intervention in his becoming one of the world’s leading paleontologists.

How to account for the dinosaur he found in a cereal box when he was six years old? Could a cheap plastic model such as that really inspire a child like him to regularly visit the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? And would those visits explain why he subsequently scrambled up and down the cliffs of Sixteen Mile Creek near his hometown of Brampton, Ont., collecting marine invertebrate fossils? Was it just good luck that brought him to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton in 1976, when the situation was ripening for him to become vice-chairman of planning for the creation of the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller? And who could imagine luck playing a role in his meeting and marrying an attractive Danish palynologist who is as adventurous as he is and thrives in doing the administrative and organizational things that Currie hates to do?

Currie, however, has another explanation for his fascination with dinosaurs.

“I constantly fantasized about discovering dinosaurs, reading and often re-reading every book I could find on the subject,” he says. “But it was the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews who really turned me on. I was 11 years old when I read his book All About Dinosaurs. The power of the written word was what really made me want to be a dinosaur hunter. Extraordinary when you think about it in this day of video games and tweeting.”

Currie doesn’t dispute the idea that he sometimes models himself after Andrews, who is often but wrongly cited as the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character in Steven Spielberg’s famous dinosaur films. In the 1920s, the zoologist trekked through uncharted jungles of Asia and the deserts of Outer Mongolia, risking his life many times in a search for fossils he collected for the American Museum of Natural History.

Like Currie, he claimed to be “born under a lucky star.”

Currie, however, is quick to point out that with a few notable exceptions, such as the time when a gun-toting, horse-riding fossil poacher tried to drive him and his expedition away from a rich fossil bed in Mongolia, he is risk-averse.

“Sometimes, you have no control over what happens,” he says after describing matter-of-factly how difficult it was working in the mountains of Antarctica, where the only way to get to the frigid high-altitude site was by helicopter.

“A few years back, we applied to go into a remote part of China near the Mongolian border. The army said no because it was a demilitarized zone. But when we reapplied to the central government, they gave us the go-ahead. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell the army. So when the army found us there digging, they checked our permits to see what we were up to. Then suddenly, they took us by the arm and marched us to a small village in the middle of the desert where we were lined up against a wall. You can imagine what we were thinking. But then the general stepped in beside us and ordered pictures to be taken of him with us.”

Dinosaurs, of course, aren’t what they used to be in Roy Chapman Andrews’ day or during the half century that followed when new discoveries, better forensic tools and multi-disciplinary thinking gave us a more accurate view of what dinosaurs looked and sounded like, how they behaved and how they interacted.

Gone, for example, is the Velociraptor in Stephen Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park. Studies have shown that although the real Velociraptor was a vicious killer, as portrayed in the movie, it had feathers and was no bigger than a dog.

We also know that the gentle Brontosaurus in The Land Before Time and other films was not the smooth-skinned, 50-tonne swamp creature that was easy prey for any large predator that came along. Now more accurately referred to as Apatosaurus or its close cousin Diplodocus, this dinosaur was even bigger than depicted earlier. It also lived on land rather than in swamps and was often capable of putting up a good fight.

And then there is T. rex, the most famous dinosaur of all. Several recent groundbreaking studies have shown that the king of dinosaurs was a lot faster than previously thought and even more frightening looking than portrayed in those early films.

Currie is one of a small group of contemporary paleontologists who have played key roles in reshaping our thinking of dinosaurs.

He was, for example, right in hypothesizing that some tyrannosaurs were very social. And most people agree he is onto something in suggesting some new species may actually be previously identified dinosaurs that were at different stages of their growth cycle or of the opposite sex.

“The fossil evidence suggests that baby or juvenile dinosaurs were not simply a smaller version of adults,” he says. “As they mature, their anatomy sometimes changes in such a radical way that it might be easy to conclude that they represented a different species.”

Still, Currie has a soft spot for those early images of dinosaurs like the ones that were on display at the Crystal Palace in London in the 1850s.

One of the images he likes best is one that colleague Dale Russell created when he speculated how a bipedal predator such as Troodon would have evolved if a meteorite hadn’t triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Russell’s Dinosauroid still had large eyes and three fingers on each hand, and it might have sounded like a bird. But in many others ways, it resembled an intelligent human in the way that Spielberg’s alien did in the film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.

Many paleontologists were repulsed by the anthropomorphism they saw in the model. What the critics failed to appreciate, says Currie, is that it was an important thought experiment. Underlying the effort was the recognition that the brain of Troodon was unusually large for a dinosaur. Had this creature survived and retained the same body size, he points out, it would only be slightly smaller than the brain of a human.

Currie credits Bob Carroll, his PhD supervisor at McGill University, for encouraging him to look at dinosaurs as animals instead of fossils.

It was that kind of thinking that inspired him and a new generation of paleontologists to successfully challenge the long-held view that some dinosaurs were physiologically closer to birds and other modern animals than to reptiles.

Despite the misguided theories of the past, Currie has nothing but admiration for those pioneers of paleontology.

“The fact is that even today we rarely find an entire dinosaur,” he says. “So more often than not in the past, especially in the days when we didn’t have CT scans and other technologies, there was a lot of guessing that went into building dinosaur models.”

Currie has a lot of admirers, but the circumstances surrounding his move from the Tyrrell Museum to the University of Alberta in 1995 say a lot about how he views himself.

In 1994, the U of A’s Michael Caldwell joined Currie and Koppelhus in the field, hoping to convince Currie to consider making the move from the museum to an academic life in which he would mentor students and continue to do field work.

Koppelhus says her husband just didn’t get what Caldwell was up to.

“It couldn’t have been more clear. Michael was doing everything to get Phil to accept. But Phil thought he was thinking of someone else until I took him aside and told him what was going on.”

Currie says he misses the Tyrrell in many ways because he was there from the beginning and accomplished a lot. But he acknowledges that being out of government makes it easier for him to do what he likes, especially now that he has a Canada Research chair that provides funding and resources to continue his cutting-edge research.

“I guess it was luck that made this happen,” he says.

But Currie hasn’t always been lucky.

A trip to the Arctic in the 1980s yielded just one tiny fossil. On that trip, Russell left their tents behind in a helicopter transfer, thinking they could sleep under the midnight sun. None of them had any idea there could be so many mosquitoes on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic.

Then there’s the time 12 years ago when Currie asked the British military if it would transport the 300-kilogram backbone of a duck-billed dinosaur from the Dry Island site in southern Alberta. All seemed to be going well when the helicopter began carrying the fossil out on a sling. But when the load began swaying dangerously, the pilot was forced to jettison it.

“It was surreal,” says Currie. “We could see the dust rising from the ground before we heard the thud. There was nothing left to salvage but dust.”

Now in his 63rd year of life, Currie doesn’t envision himself slowing down soon, although he and Koppelhus are determined to spend more time working in their garden in Edmonton, listening to music and sitting by the fire.

Next year, they plan to be back in the badlands of Alberta, possibly in the deserts of Patagonia, at a field site in Edmonton and in the Pipestone Creek region of Grande Prairie. He’d like to go back to the Arctic, Antarctica and Mongolia.

“I don’t see myself retiring ever,” he says. “I see myself disappearing in a puff of smoke.”