MARKETING A MUSEUM
The exquisite Currie Dinosaur Museum sits at the heart of a paleontologist’s dream, writes Liane Faulder, yet it is still seeking the perfect formula to lure dino lovers north.
University of Calgary paleontology student Cameron Reed, left, and Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum field assistant Jackson Sweder work at the Pipestone Creek bone bed near Wembley. The museum lets visitors work alongside the pros on the dig.
That maddening gap between what we know, and what we don’t know, roots all scientific pursuits.
The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, which opened in September 2015 as an exquisitely curated homage to the northern creatures of the Cretaceous period, is a near-perfect illustration of that tension. It is hard to imagine a visitor leaving its confines without being impressed by what the Currie represents — a bright link between the almost-impenetrable past and the curious present.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the Pipestone Creek bonebed, located a few kilometres from the museum’s home in the Alberta town of Wembley, 19 kilometres west of Grande Prairie.
Here, throughout the 2019 summer dig season, paleontologists will carefully excavate a three-square metre segment of riverbank in an effort to connect the dots between then and now, with a focus on the star species of the area, the pachyrhinosaurus lakusti — a horned herbivore and relative of triceratops distinguished by a large, bony frill behind the skull and a thick, knobby structure above the nose and eyes.
How many dinosaurs are buried in this location, and how old were they when they died? How quickly did the creatures grow, and what did they eat? What flora existed around them and what does that say about the ecosystem? What brought them to their death, and who scavenged their carcasses?
On a drizzly June day, paleontologist and Currie assistant curator Derek Larson, along with university students Cameron Reed, Becca Bullock and Jackson Sweder, plus the museum’s education co-ordinator, Nick Carter, are trying hard not to slip in the slick brown mud that covers the site as they set up for a day’s work.
Each digger has a collection kit containing chisels, hammers and paintbrushes. Sweder heads for a specimen identified earlier, which looks like a plain, dark rock, indistinguishable to the average eye from the chunks of ironstone, mudstone and sandstone also jutting from the tangled bank of Pipestone Creek.
But Larson sees more. This is a bone, probably the tibia of a pachyrhinosaurus lakusti, which roamed the Grande Prairie area during the Cretaceous period, the end of which marked the extinction, some 66 million years ago, of the non-bird dinosaurs on earth.
As many as hundreds of pachyrhinosaurus lakusti are encased in a massive bonebed underneath Larson’s feet. At least the size of a football field or two, the bonebed has been teased into view over millennia by erosion. While the site at Pipestone Creek (part of the Wapiti river system) has been under examination since it was first discovered in the mid1970s by local high school science teacher and dinosaur enthusiast Al Lakusta — only 50 square metres of it has been excavated.
“There will be dinosaurs buried here long after we are all dead and gone,” muses Larson. “We are just nibbling at the edges.”
The scale of the find is massive. There are up to 200 bones per square metre, and the bone layer itself is two-thirds bone by volume. While the resources available to unearth that treasure are naturally limited, there is a strange comfort in that. Some things, it seems, are beyond the reach of immediate gratification, and take time to access, and to appreciate. (In that respect, it is much like the Currie museum itself, given the distance of the trip for most Albertans).
Though it’s only the beginning, the work at Pipestone represents more than the pursuit of science. It’s also part of a campaign to attract more attention to the museum and its offerings. Indeed, throughout the summer, tourists are invited to join professionals in Paleontologist for a Day — an intense, authentic experience that sees regular folk work on the excavation site, learning how to unearth fossils and prepare them for the lab.
The goal of the program is not just to connect the public with science, and to contribute to the store of scientific information. It’s also to convince tourists and locals alike that a mere five hours from Edmonton (and only 10 minutes outside Grande Prairie) dwells the dinosaur experience of a lifetime.
The Royal Tyrrell, southern Alberta’s dino museum behemoth may be three times the size of the Currie, with 30 years of tourism experience under its belt and tantalizing proximity to Dinosaur Provincial Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But as the Currie museum closes in on its fourth anniversary, promoters are still looking to lure dinosaur enthusiasts with the opportunity to get out from under all those hoodoos and into the verdant boreal forest, where a mysterious journey began 73 million years ago.
If paleontologists are the homicide detectives of the dinosaur world, Pipestone Creek is a crime scene that’s filthy with evidence. There, a herd of hundreds of pachyrhinosaurus lakusti (including adults and babies) died in what looks like a mass catastrophic event, perhaps a flood that occurred while the dinosaurs were crossing a river.
But as is often the case when it comes to answering questions about dinosaurs, who roamed the earth for roughly 165 million years, nobody knows for sure what happened.
“We’re always looking for the best answer, based on available evidence,” says Dr. Corwin Sullivan, the Currie museum’s curator, who holds a $2-million endowed chair funded by the country of Grande Prairie — the Phillip J. Currie professor of vertebrate paleontology — at the University of Alberta.
The evidence at Pipestone also points to a second flood that may have hit the area somewhat later, jumbling the bones of the pachyrhinosaurus lakusti. Both devastating floods were during the Cretaceous period, when an inland sea occupied parts of Alberta, and the climate was warm and swampy. Vegetation, including magnolia and cypress trees, resembled present-day parts of the southeastern United States.
As one of the world’s most dense dinosaur sites, the Pipestone Creek bonebed provides scientists with numerous opportunities to fill gaps in knowledge. That’s in part because southern Alberta was under an ocean during the Cretaceous period; northern excavations add valuable dinosaur context for that time period in Alberta.
“It’s a unique scenario,” says Larson. “Pipestone is super-dense, it’s from the north, and preserves a point of time that is rare.”
In addition to pachyrhinosaurus lakisti — the only species of its kind in the world — Pipestone has yielded bones from tyrannosaurs, as well as small, meat-eating dinosaurs such as raptor boreonykus and troodon. Plus, there is a lot of amber (fossilized tree sap) within this deposit, and amber is a gold mine of information for paleontologists. While Jurassic Park’s premise that ancient DNA locked within amber could invoke a live dinosaur is pure Hollywood invention, insects and elements inside the amber say much about the ecosystem of the era.
For participants in the Paleontologist for a Day program, the discovery of amber can be thrilling. Squatting amid the dirt and mosquitoes with a hammer and chisel is hard work, but chancing on a gleaming nugget of amber is its own reward. If it’s big enough (the size of a chunk of sea salt, say), the amber will be tucked into a specimen bag and taken for analysis to the museum’s lab, where it will join some 500 samples stored at the museum.
Once samples — from amber, to teeth to skulls — are prepared and catalogued by technicians, they are available for academics to write papers about. They also form displays at the museum, which contain both original bones, and casts of animals.
For those willing to make the trek to this remote section of boreal forest, imagination meets fact in a bright collision of wonder and science inside the 41,000-squarefoot Currie museum. There, a replica of the Pipestone bonebed kicks off a tour that includes extensive, detailed and family-friendly exhibits of the Cretaceous and the Devonian eras that dominate the museum. There is also a smaller display on the oil and gas industry (spawn of the Devonian) prominently supported by the energy industry.
Displays are large, visceral and evocative. They change as the field work moves along, and more animal skeletons become available for viewing. You can hear what a dinosaur’s roar might have sounded like, and see fossilized imprints of its scaly skin. Visitors feel themselves drawn into the search for answers even as they wander the exhibits (one invites participants to crawl inside, and pop out in the middle of the exhibit — face-toface with a skeleton.)
Opened in 2015 to great fanfare and a celebrity donation by Canadian-born actor Dan Aykroyd, whose family are dinosaur enthusiasts, the museum is world-class. In its first year, the Currie scooped nine museum and design awards and scores of positive press reports, including a ranking in Conde Nast Traveller as one of the world’s top museum openings. It also saw 120,000 visitors; more than double the 60,000 expected.
But since then, the museum (named after the University of Alberta paleontologist and world-renowned expert Phillip J. Currie who has devoted his career to exploring in the area) has struggled.
A series of directors have cycled through, there were fundraisers that barely covered costs, and the $34-million museum (built with $10 million in provincial funds, and more than $19 million from the County of Grande Prairie) has not been able to secure provincial or federal funding for day-to-day operations.
The museum collects money from a number of sources for its annual budget of $1.4 million dollars, including $300,000 from the county of Grande Prairie and $150,000 from the municipal district of Greenview (which includes Grande Cache and Fox Creek). Even the teeny town of Wembley, with a population of only 1,800, contributes $5,000 a year.
Last year, roughly 70,000 people attended the museum, netting $400,000 in revenue, with gift shop and restaurant sales adding about $200,000 to the pie. The chair of the Currie’s board of directors, prominent local businesswoman Linda Side, says the museum makes up the shortfall through fundraisers such as the Amber Ball. But she says an ongoing struggle to balance the books is “a distraction from any constructive forward motion.”
“It precludes you from any sort of evolution. (Raising funds) becomes a focus, instead of development,” says Side.
Other major museums in Alberta enjoy ongoing provincial funding. Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum has a 2018-19 operating budget of $8.9 million, $6.5 of which comes from tickets and gift shop sales, with $2.4 coming from the province. For the 2018-19 budget year, Edmonton’s Royal Alberta Museum will receive more than $21 million from the province.
Recently, the Currie museum received accreditation from the Alberta Museums Association, which increases funding possibilities. County of Grande Prairie Reeve Leanne Beaupre says local officials have requested meetings with representatives of the new United Conservative government to appeal for operating funds — Finance Minister Travis Toews is the MLA for Grande Prairie-Wapiti — but so far, no money has materialized.
Complicating the situation is that despite its indisputable worldclass bona fides, the Currie must compete for public attention with the Tyrrell, which is located much closer to Calgary and Edmonton and sees upwards of 450,000 visitors a year. The challenge for the Currie’s new executive director Linden Roberts, who assumed the post in April, is to perform the museum equivalent of persuading football fans that the CFL really offers a better overall football experience than the NFL. No doubt it’s true, but how do you get the word out?
“Museums don’t naturally attract visitors all on their own,” says Roberts, who spent more than six years overseeing the development of the exhibits at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton before being hired at the Currie. “They are a business.”
In an interview and photo session conducted at the RAM (where she had meetings recently), Roberts talked about her business plan for the Currie. One priority is to engage the local population (there are 285,000 people within two hours of the museum) to come often to the museum, particularly in the off-season. She hopes a roster of renowned speakers, movies (the museum has the only licence in Canada to show National Geographic films in the Aykroyd Family Theatre), music nights and events such as Wing Wednesdays in the Dine-O-Saur restaurant will do the trick.
“We have the best restaurant in Wembley,” says Roberts with a mischievous smile. “Although it’s the only restaurant in Wembley.”
Plus, Roberts, whose resume includes stints at the Ontario Science Centre, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, is working with Grande Prairie Regional Tourism to attract tourists from elsewhere in the province (80 per cent of visitors in Alberta are other Albertans). She plans to pilot a jet-boat excursion this summer, one that would see tourists boating along the Wapiti, visiting several bonebeds. Grande Prairie Regional Tourism’s James Leppan is considering travel packages that would entice visitors to spend two nights in the area — perhaps combining time at the museum and bonebed with a day of mountain biking at Nitehawk Adventure Park (a local ski hill with bike trails).
If shopping is what tourists are looking for, says Leppan, Grande Prairie has numerous attractions, including the largest Ford dealership in western Canada — plus a Lululemon. The Art Gallery of Grande Prairie is a Category A gallery, and other urban experiences include a boutique gin distillery and two craft breweries.
Still, the Pipestone bonebed is undeniably the jewel in this northern crown. It’s a destination for school tours and camp programs and is readily accessible but a short walk from a local campground for anyone interested. There are also group tours of the bonebed for as little as five dollars, but Roberts has particularly high hopes for growth of the Paleontologist for a Day program — a program that doesn’t exist at the Tyrell.
It runs three days a week, all summer long, and costs $275 for a small-group experience that includes a full day in the bonebed with experts, plus time at the museum, and two meals.
“It’s the real thing, an incredible opportunity to see how the paleontologist sees the site. It’s not interpreted. There is no piece of glass between you and the bones,” says Roberts. “And you get the mosquitoes for free.”