FOSSILS FUELLED

Canada's Alberta gives dino fan Dan Townend no end of places to explore

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Every youngster has a period in their childhood where their fascination with all things dinosaurs and fossils knows no bounds. Reading the books, trips to the Natural History Museum, dragging the family to the Jurassic Coast to look for ammonites. We've all been there.

And some of us, of course, never really grow out of that interest in all things prehistoric, as we happily watch Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park for the umpteenth time.

So, with interest piqued by the recent series of Walking With Dinosaurs on the BBC, it felt time to play my amateur palaeontologist card and go dino hunting - in one of the most fossil-rich areas of the world, Alberta, Canada.

Direct flights to Calgary from Heathrow take just over eight hours, and from there it is just a two-hour drive east on wide, empty roads to Dinosaur Provincial Park - home to over 55 different species of dinosaurs and more than 150 complete dinosaur skeletons. Many people camp over in the park but travelling from Calgary on the day is possible.

The scenery is out of this world. After miles upon miles of prairie land, we came upon the Badlands - named by explorers centuries ago because of the inhospitable terrain with its surreal mounds of sandstone structures and deep valleys. Think a mini Grand Canyon. But the explorers were wrong the Badlands turn out to be very good for one thing: dinosaur fossils..

The reason why is that because of a perfect storm of geographical reasons 75 million years ago, the area was ideal for dinosaurs to flourish on what was then a lush coastal plain next to the now-disappeared Bearpaw Sea.

Add that to the minerals from volcanoes further north, ideal for fossilisation, and fast-flowing water, which quickly covered dead dinosaurs in sediment, and it explains the remarkable finds that the area continues to throw up.