Episode 228 - Dinosaur Provincial Park

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Natural Sciences, Education, Earth Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2025

⏱️ 115 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Located in southeastern Alberta is a stretch of gorgeous badlands that are home to some of the world’s absolute best Late Cretaceous fossils. This episode, we explore how Dinosaur Provincial Park earned its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, we list off some of the famous dinosaurs who once lived there, and we discuss a fraction of the many fossil discoveries that have been made at the Park since the late 1800s. In the news: Cretaceous crocs, baby pterosaurs, late megaraptorans, and early lizards. Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:06:25Main discussion, Part 1: 00:47:45Main discussion, Part 2: 01:08:35Patron question: 01:47:00 Check out our website for this episode’s blog post and more: http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Subscribe to Curiosity Box using our Affiliate Link: https://www.curiositybox.com/CommonDescentAnd get 25% off the first box with code descent25 Got a topic you want to hear about? Submit your episode request here: https://commondescentpodcast.com/request-a-topic/ Lots more ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, Will. Hello, David.
0:21.6	Hello, everybody out there on the internet world, and welcome to Common Descent, a podcast
0:25.9	where we talk about paleontology, evolution, the history of life on Earth, and sometimes
0:30.0	we zero in on very specific, exciting, paleontological localities.
0:35.7	This is episode 228. This time we are discussing Dinosaur Provincial
0:41.3	Park. Very cool. It's a really cool for the study of dinosaurs. This is one of the biggest
0:48.7	name locations in the world. Dinosaur Provincial Park is a park. It is a provincial park located in the province of
0:56.6	Alberta and Canada. It is a provincial park for a lot of reasons, and we'll talk about those
1:01.9	later in the episode. But the name Dinosaur Provincial Park is in honor of the fact that the
1:08.8	most spectacular thing scientifically about this area is an absolutely incredible abundance of late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.
1:17.6	Dinosaur Provincial Park is one of the top places in the world for studying dinosaurs in particular from almost at the end of the age of dinosaurs itself.
1:29.1	This episode, we will talk about what the park is, a bit of the history of the park,
1:33.7	why it's exciting, and then we'll go on a deep dive into the kinds of paleontological discoveries
1:39.7	that have been made at the park. Very exciting stuff.
1:43.5	We're going to talk about this partially, because it's extremely cool and deserving of recognition,
1:49.0	partially because I just went there earlier this year.
1:53.2	Nora and I took a trip to Dinosaur Provincial Park, so I am inspired.
1:56.6	Also, the blog post will be full of pictures that we took at the park, which will be very fun.
2:02.8	And, of course, as with all of our episodes, this topic was requested by our listeners.
2:08.5	This time in particular, requested by AJ, Aaron, Athena, Harley, Jackson, and Melly.
2:15.7	Thanks for the requests. You're all lucky that David had to find something to do with all those pictures he took. Now I can do. Now I can put these pictures. Thank goodness. I made a whole podcast episode so I could show these pictures around. Pretty sure all of these requests came before we went to the park. So this was already on the requestless, and I came back and I was looking over the request
	...

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