Alberta - Buffalo Stones And Dinosaur Skulls
In the final chapter of our three-part Badlands videos, we meet their most famous residents - the ones who have been dead for millions of years.
EPISODE NOTES
Some of the inniskim featured in the animations here are from the collection at the Royal Ontario Museum, which I did a special trip to just to grab some shots of them on my phone. I hope that admission doesn’t come back to bite me.
Despite noting off the top of the episode that I was going to explain why I used ‘buffalo’ and not ‘bison’ throughout the episode, you better believe I still got sassed for calling bison buffalo. To reiterate: there are no true ‘buffalo’ in North America, only in Asia and Africa. We have bison. It gets messy because the root word is the french ‘boeuf’ which, historically, was a looser term describing game animals, not specific to a species. So when that word was applied to both the buffalo of the old world and the bison of the new world, it wasn’t that they thought they were the same animal, they were just using a broader category like ‘mammal’ or ‘animal we like to eat’.
transcript
For centuries, the Blackfoot Confederacy have told a story about a very special stone. It’s said this stone calls out to you with the chirp of a bird or a sweet song.
They could have intricate patterns, beautiful metallic shine, and very specific shapes. They called them Iniskim / Iinisskimm/ I-nis’-kim. Buffalo Stones. Some even naturally look like buffalo.
The nomadic Blackfoot were always inextricably connected with the buffalo. The cycle of their lives followed the movement of buffalo herds across the plains. And this stone was said to bestow the bearer with power over them. Legend says the first Iniskim saved a Blackfoot clan from starvation by calling back the buffalo.
Buffalo stones’ unique shapes, patterns and shine are because they’re segments of fossilized ammonites, wide-ranging and diverse creatures that lived in late cretaceous seas. And the Blackfoot kept finding them because the conditions that gave birth to the badlands in Alberta were also absolutely perfect for creating fossils.
Let’s rewind to the late Cretaceous, 75 million years ago - when Alberta was half underwater and half a tropical forest. As rivers flowed from the mountains to the seas, they would often carry the bodies of dead animals with them. At the mouth of the river, continuous sediment deposits would quickly bury and preserve those bodies - along with the shells of sea creatures like ammonites, allowing them to become fossilized.
That enormous treasure trove of fossils lay dormant until the glacial runoff at the end of the last ice age washed away the surface layers and revealed them for the first time. They were there when the Blackfoot arrived, and served as Iniskim for centuries.
But modern palaeontology in Alberta only begins in 1884. That’s when Joseph Tyrell is exploring the badlands region by boat. He starts to notice bones sticking out of the cliffs, followed by an entire skull. Eventually the creature it belonged to would be fittingly named Albertasaurus. The first dinosaur discovered here but far from the last.
Since then the badlands have revealed themselves to be one of the richest fossil beds in the world. 58 species of dinosaur and counting. The Tyrell museum in Drumheller now has more than 160,000 specimens in their collection - and so many coming in all the time that they have a 45-year backlog.
For palaeontologists, this place is a gift that never stops giving. Thanks to constant erosion, to this day you can still find bones by just strolling through and looking down. OK, not quite like that, but close. In fact 70% of the park is still restricted to the public, to keep it pristine for their work.
New species are still being discovered - including another one in 2017 that got the provincial mantle: Albertavenator Curriei. There are more detailed drawings out there, but I love this one.
And just this past year, a field school volunteer came upon the remains of a hadrosaur with its skin intact, an incredibly rare find.
So the point - of, really, this whole journey we’ve been going on - is that, at a glance the badlands can seem inhospitable and unwelcoming.
But for a land that can feel so dead, it is so alive in so many ways. In the myths and legends its inspired. In the species that have found their niche here. In the fossilized menagerie sticking out of the rock. And in the geography itself - as those soft sedimentary layers continue to be shaped by wind and rain, the whole landscape is constantly shifting and evolving. In effect, a new place to discover every time.