To find dinosaurs, you start by looking in the right places.

4. A World-Class Location

Dinosaur fossils are thick and abundant here, turning up in such a profusion as to astonish anyone accustomed to the difficulty of finding such fossils elsewhere. The main stretch of badlands has been recognized by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site, and it is carefully administered by the Canadian government as Dinosaur Provincial Park. The Park's museum counterpart is the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, a huge facility that nonetheless bursts at the seams with dinosaurs, the bulk of the specimens coming from these very sediments.

For dinosaur hunters, the Alberta badlands are a legendary game reserve. Dinosaur Provincial Park is rivaled by a few other top-rated fossil territories in the world, but exceeded by none; this is the big time, and paleontologists revel in the opportunities for discoveries that can be made here. Phaeton Group's Chief Paleontologist Michael J. Ryan has been working in these canyons of time for over twenty years, and it was to this fantastic location that a Phaeton team traveled on a paleontology mission in late summer 2002.