INTRODUCTION / INTRODUCTION

Introduction to Albertosaurus Special Issue

Philip J. Currie and Eva B. Koppelhus

This special issue is being published to mark the passageof a century since Barnum Brown made a remarkable dis-covery in the badlands of Alberta. Brown was from theAmerican Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NewYork, and he had come to Alberta the previous year (1909)to check a report of dinosaur bones near the present-daytown of Drumheller. He had been impressed enough tomount an expedition that set off in a flat-bottomed scowdown the Red Deer River on August 3, 1910. As theyfloated downstream, they frequently stopped and looked forfossils in the badlands. On August 11th, they found whatthey thought was much of an Albertosaurus skeleton inhard rock. They realized by the next day, however, thatthey were in fact excavating the well-preserved bones ofseveral individuals. In his fieldnotes, Brown’s assistant PeterKaisen noted that the ‘‘whole top of a hill is nothing but amass of bone. There are four hind feet in sight, vertebrae,and a lot of limb bones.’’ On September 4th, they loadedeight boxes of bones (the product of 29 man-days spent inthe bonebed) on the scow and floated the expedition fartherdownstream. The specimens were shipped to New York,where they were prepared, put on display for a short time,and then mostly forgotten.

Although Brown occasionally mentioned the 1910 discov-ery in papers (Brown 1914; Matthew and Brown 1923) andpopular publications, he never wrote anything specific aboutthe Albertosaurus bonebed. It is quite clear from examiningthe specimens in the AMNH that he recognized the signifi-cance of the site because he selectively collected the parts ofskeletons that gave him a good count of the minimum num-ber of individuals. There were parts of at least nine Alberto-saurus recovered, in contrast with the near absence of fossilsof herbivorous dinosaurs (Currie 2000). The fact that Brownhad found a site dominated by carnivorous dinosaurs wasnoted by Russell and Chamney (1967) and mentioned byFarlow (1976) in the context of possible evidence for pack-ing behaviour in theropods. The site was relocated in 1997(Currie 2000) by a joint expedition of the Royal Tyrrell Mu-

seum of Palaeontology (TMP), Drumheller, Alberta, and thenow defunct Dinamation International Society (Fruitland,Colorado). It was found on the basis of a single photographin the archives of the American Museum of Natural History(Fig. 1) and confirmed when a piece of matrix found in thequarry in 1998 fit onto a specimen in the AMNH collections(Fig. 2).

The AMNH crew had only excavated a small part of theAlbertosaurus bonebed (Tyrrell Museum locality L2204) in1910. The excavations have been greatly extended by staffand volunteers of the TMP (1998–2005) and the Universityof Alberta (2006–2010). At last count, more than 200 differ-ent people have worked at the site since 1998, and they haverecovered close to 1500 specimens from approximately200 m2 (see fig. 9 in Eberth and Currie 2010). A specimenin this case can consist of either a single tooth or bone, or acollection of up to 30 articulated bones from a single indi-vidual. Not all bones were collected in the excavated area,but even broken fragments of ribs were included in thequarry maps. The distribution of bone is uneven, with someareas of the quarry having 50 or more bones per squaremetre, and other areas being devoid of fossils (probably be-cause of surface erosion). Many of the specimens are com-pletely disarticulated, some are associated, some arearticulated, and there are even skin impressions (TMP2003.45.88). Articulated, partial skeletons tend to be at thesouth end of the quarry, close to where Brown worked in1910.

Macrovertebrate (dinosaur) fossils dominate in thebonebed, but 19 microvertebrate taxa have also been identi-fied (Larson et al. 2010). More than 90% of the macroverte-brate fossils are from Albertosaurus sarcophagus, and 7%can be referred to at least two individuals of the hadrosaurHypacrosaurus altispinus. The minimum number of Alberto-saurus individuals from the bonebed can be estimated in dif-ferent ways, which produce a range from 12 (Eberth andCurrie 2010) to 26 (Erickson et al. 2010). These animalsrange in age from two to 24 years old (Erickson et al.2010) and suggest that Albertosaurus sarcophagus was gre-garious at some level (Currie 2000). On the basis of currentevidence, it is not possible to determine how complex thegregarious behaviour was. On the one hand, Albertosaurusindividuals may have simply tolerated the presence of con-specifics for short periods of time when food resourceswere abundant or during times of extreme environmentalstress. At the other extreme of behavioural responses, thespecies might have been capable of cooperative hunting sim-ilar to some living species of mammals and birds.

Received 18 June 2010. Accepted 30 June 2010. Published onthe NRC Research Press Web site at cjes.nrc.ca on 16 August2010.

Paper handled by Associate Editor H.-D. Sues.

P.J. Currie1 and E.B. Koppelhus. University of Alberta,Department of Biological Sciences, CW405 Biological SciencesBuilding, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada.

1Corresponding author (e-mail: Philip.Currie@ualberta.ca).

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Can. J. Earth Sci. 47: 1111–1114 (2010) doi:10.1139/E10-065 Published by NRC Research Press

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Regardless of whether or not the level of behaviouralcomplexity can be determined for Albertosaurus sarcopha-gus, excavation of the Albertosaurus bonebed (TMP L2204)

has produced a tremendous amount of information andspecimens, and it has stimulated a great deal of broadlybased research. Publications include anatomical (Currie

Fig. 1. The Albertosaurus bonebed in 1910 (top) and 1999 (bottom). The original photograph (Image 18926, American Museum of NaturalHistory Library, reproduced with permission) was taken by Barnum Brown. It shows field assistant Peter Kaisen sitting in the quarry. Try-ing to find and identify old quarries in the badlands of Alberta is difficult, but in this case the spruce-lined ridge behind Kaisen had changedlittle over the intervening years, as seen in the lower photograph (TMP 2000.023.302) taken by P.J. Currie. It shows field assistant JohnAlexander sitting in remains of the 1910 quarry. The high point on the left side of the photograph can now be recognized as a distinctivemesa known as the Dry Island, which gives its name to Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park.

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2003; Buckley et al. 2010; Reichel 2010) and other studiesof the biology of Albertosaurus (Currie 2000; Bell 2010;Erickson et al. 2004, 2006, 2010), the geology and taphon-omy of the site (Eberth and Currie 2010), the palynologyand palaeobotany of the bonebed (Koppelhus and Braman2010), and the description of new taxa (Longrich and Currie2009; Newbrey et al. 2010). Public interest in the bonebedhas also led to its inclusion in popular publications (Felberet al. 1998; Fischman 1999; Banks 2000; Grady 2001;Padma 2006; Dingus and Norell 2010) and films. It is hopedthat the publication of this special issue of the CanadianJournal of Earth Sciences will make other researchers awareof the wealth of material available for further study. Andalthough the current phase of the excavation of TMP L2204ended in 2010, much of the bonebed remains unexcavatedand is available for future work.

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Fig. 2. Pedal phalanx (AMNH 5218) of Albertosaurus sarcophagusin dorsal (top) and ventral (bottom) views. The phalanx was col-lected by the American Museum expedition in 1910 and is attachedto the sandstone counterpart that was found in the Albertosaurusbonebed (TMP L2204) in 1998. Note that the impression of anotherphalanx can also be seen in the top view. Photographs by CarlMehling, AMNH.

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