Dinosaur skull digs up new tourism opportunities for Alta. museum

Philip J. Currie Museum executive director Linden Roberts looks over Big Sam with Bamforth at the museum lab in Wembley, Alta. on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. This was the first skull to be extracted from the bone bed in about 16 years and could possible unlock some mysteries of the local dinosaurs past. (Photo by Jesse Boily)

The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum (PJCDM) will receive $250,000 to support the future display of the museum's most significant find.

The funds will come from Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan), a federal government department meant to support business, innovation and community economic development in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Paleontologists from the museum recently unearthed a 72-million-year-old, 1.6 metre-long, 272-kilogram skull of a pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a dinosaur unique to the Grande Prairie region.

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"This will be a big fossil that's completely homegrown. It will have been found by the paleontologists who work in the museum, who prepared the fossil for the excavation or to take it out, and it will stay in our lab and be worked on here, and it will go on display here," said Linden Roberts, PJCDM executive director.

The PrairiesCan funds will go toward building a display case for the skull and developing tours of the laboratory that prepares fossils, while also creating a program to help people prepare fossils themselves.

She said the funding fits the museum's mandate of showing the "science behind paleontology."

"We have lab tours at the moment, but it's a very cluttered lab, and so we will work on changing the structure of the lab so that we can accommodate more people and provide a really high quality experience," said Roberts.

She said it will then not only allow visitors to help prepare actual fossils, but also teach them how paleontologists learn from fossils.

"We have a lot of fossils that need to be prepared (and) we have other sites other than the (Pipestone) bonebed that the fossils are being prepared from," said Roberts.

It will also give locals the ability to closely follow along as the fossils are prepared and learn about what locals are discovering about the pachyrhinosaurus.

The museum will also be using the funds to begin developing multi-day overnight experiences taking visitors to dig sites all around the region.

"When people come to a site or decide to come to a site as tourists, they don't come here because there's one thing; they come here because there are things to do, and so part of our role, as we develop up the tourism side of being a museum, is to take the responsible role of tourism anchor and create opportunities for other tourism operators to get business, so this will be partnerships with other businesses in the area," said Roberts.

The announcement from PrairiesCan came in September; about $4 million was tagged for non-profits across the province.

"(These) investments are expected to support more than 165 jobs and leverage approximately $2.8 million in additional funding through other orders of government and industry," said PrairiesCan in a media release.

This article was first published to The Canadian Press on Oct. 24, 2024