When I moved to Alberta in 1976 to become the curator of paleontology at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum), I was hamstrung by a lack of funding and an attitude that suggested there was no point in putting money into collecting dinosaurs because there were none left.
When I moved to Alberta in 1976 to become the curator of paleontology at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum), I was hamstrung by a lack of funding and an attitude that suggested there was no point in putting money into collecting dinosaurs because there were none left. The thought was that they had all been collected by eastern museums in the early decades of the 20th century.
It took a year to realize that without funding and manpower, I could find dinosaurs but I could not collect them.
My first volunteer was a high-school student, but he made a difference. More discoveries led to more publicity. And we built the volunteer program into a highly successful international program that not only helped us collect dinosaurs, but influenced the development of the science itself by giving future researchers the chance to work on Alberta’s fantastic paleontological resources.
More publicity led to more funding and more volunteers, which created a positive feedback system that eventually became a major contributing factor to the creation of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. One could even argue that it was a major factor in today’s unprecedented international interest in dinosaurs.
Continue reading at University of Alberta.
Image via John Ulan.
