OTTAWA — Phil Currie knew from age 12 that he was going to be a dinosaur hunter, and he never looked back, even though there were only two such jobs in Canada and both were taken.
He’s 63 now, about to be honoured for a lifetime of achievement that includes so many dinosaur finds, Alberta had to build the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology to hold them.
But a lifetime achievement award (coming Wednesday evening from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society) doesn’t mean his career is finished. Too many dinosaurs remain to be found.
“We in fact have so few dinosaurs in relation to what must have existed,” said Currie.
There are about 1,000 known species, he said this week via telephone from Alberta before flying to Ottawa. “Sounds like a lot on the face of it, but then you’ve got 4,000 living species of mammals (today), 10,000 species of living birds ... 6,000 species of living ‘herps,’ or reptiles and amphibians. And that’s all at one time.”
Dinosaurs came and went for 150 million years. The 1,000 known today, he suggests, may represent only one per cent of all that lived.
Where are the rest?
Some lived and died in areas not suited to preserving fossils, such as sandy soil. Many are likely in Africa, where political unrest has slowed exploration but where there are “some spectacular dinosaur sites.” He also likes Antarctica as a potential site.
And he’s happy to go anywhere.
“The thing is that it’s such a thrill to find a dinosaur fossil, and you just never know what’s going to come next.
“You always go into the field with sort of a preconceived idea of what you want to find or could find or should find, but the reality is there are so many other things to find that you keep your eyes open. And you end up going in a different direction than you thought.”
That new direction may even be better than what he has planned. “The feathered dinosaurs are an example of that. Until they were found, nobody looked for them.”
Currie is known for examining links between dinosaurs and birds, such as dinosaur migration patterns and herding behaviour.
But he says the public is still surprised to hear about the bird-dinosaur link, and the feathered evidence.
“Every time a newspaper article or something comes out (on that topic) we still get people coming to us sand saying, ‘Wow, you’re kidding!’”
Currie is scheduled to receive the award from Dan Aykroyd and his wife Donna Dixon Aykroyd, both actors and friends of Currie, at a dinner Wednesday at the Museum of Civilization. Carleton University professor Fraser Taylor will also receive the 3M Award for Environmental Innovation for his application of cartography to the understanding of environmental issues.
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