Explorers Club honours dinosaur hunter Phil Currie

From Vancouver Sun: Explorers Club honours dinosaur hunter Phil Currie
EDMONTON — Expeditions in Mongolia and Argentina, lectures in Australia, then back to his day job in Alberta: it’s all in a year’s work for paleontologist Phil Currie.

It’s fitting, then, that the University of Alberta’s resident dinosaur hunter has been recognized for his work and travels with the prestigious Explorers Club Medal.

Currie received the award at the club’s annual gala in New York City last month. In doing so, he joined the ranks of Sir Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong and Roy Chapman Andrews, the American explorer — and supposed inspiration for Indiana Jones — who first sparked Currie’s interest in dinosaurs.

“It’s shocking and overwhelming. To even be considered close is amazing,” Currie said.

The Explorers Club was founded by Arctic and Antarctic explorers in 1904, and eventually expanded to include mountain climbers, astronauts and biologists. Today, the professional society, which supports research in the physical, natural and biological sciences, has more than 30 international chapters, including one in Canada. One of its members nominated Currie for the medal for his contributions to paleontology, from naming his first newly discovered dinosaur in 1979 to helping create the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, and for decades of exploring fossil sites around the world.

Jason Schoonover, spokesman for Canada’s Explorers Club chapter, said the medal “represents the apex of recognition.”

“Nothing else comes close,” Schoonover wrote in an email.

While Currie’s work now takes him on regular expeditions to Mongolia’s Nemegt formation and the foothills of Argentina, it’s the science, not the travel, that drives him, he said.

“If you look at my habits, unless it’s work related and I can find a dinosaur there, I probably haven’t been there,” Currie said from his office at the University of Alberta, where he is a professor and Canada Research Chair of Dinosaur Paleobiology. “It’s definitely my science. And the inquisitive mind about where dinosaurs have been. What’s the significance of the dinosaurs of Argentina to the dinosaurs of Alberta, for instance. On the face you’d think nothing, but basically right before dinosaurs went extinct, Alberta-style dinosaurs started showing up in South America. Why was it so late? We can learn a lot from asking questions like that.”

Currie said he never imagined his career would take him where it has, not as a child reading Andrews’ book All About Dinosaurs, not even as a graduate student studying to become a paleontologist. And though he’s checked off six continents, including Antarctica, there’s one the 63-year-old hasn’t hit yet.

“Just to complete the cycle, I’d like to work in Africa at some point.”