Dinosaur bones

We spent part of our camping trip in Dinosaur Provincial Park.  We had briefly stopped there in 2010 on our way across Canada and I have always wanted to go back.

There is something about camping among the hoodoos, and the cottonwoods that I find oddly satisfying.



We spent four hours at the Tyrell Museum, our third visit in five years and it again rekindled my love of, and fascination with, dinosaur fossils. 

I remember studying dinosaurs in grade four, when a brontosaurus was a brontosaurus, and my favourite book as a child was about a young boy who finds an egg and out hatches a stegosaurus that then becomes his pet.  When I close my eyes I can still see the pictures in that book. 

Because it was early in the season there were not so many tours, but I did book a sunset tour into the hoodoos. 

It was a sunny evening, cameras at the ready, and the park guide took us into areas of the park where the public cannot go on their own. 

The views were gorgeous, but at the first stop we discovered we were standing on an ancient bone bed.  Once we attuned our eyes to what to look for there were 65 million year old dinosaur bone fossils all around us. 

We could hold them if they were loose.  We were not allowed to dig them up if they were still embedded, and of course they had to be left there.

I would be lying if I said there wasn't a moment that I though of slipping one into my pocket. 

Spending three days in the dinosaur park, camping at the base of glaciers, driving through the Rockies somehow began to put my little wee life into perspective. 

Some say that we can make mountains out of mole hills. 

 (Can you see the face?)

Sometimes mountains can illuminate the mole hills of our own existence.

It is so fleeting. In perspective my life is so tiny in the big scheme of things.

And I don't imagine in 65 million years anyone will be holding my fossilized bones in their hand.