Renowned dino hunter reflects on history of paleontology after turning 75
CBC
Canada's famed dinosaur hunter and one of the inspirations for the "Jurassic Park" phenomenon turned 75 earlier this year and has no plans to drop his chisel and rock hammer.
Philip Currie says he'll keep digging until he's one with the fossils he has spent his life unearthing.
"I decided when I was about 40 or 50 that I was going to continue until, suddenly one day in the [Alberta] Badlands, I would go poof and I'd be gone," Currie said in an interview ahead of the museum that's named after him celebrating its 10th anniversary.
And he says before he does go, he hopes to find an intact specimen in Alberta of his favourite dinosaur — Troodon formosus.
It's a brainy, big-eyed dinosaur that resembles the nasty, two-legged, big-tailed and sharp-toothed velociraptor made famous in the "Jurassic Park" movie series.
"[It] was probably the most intelligent dinosaur we know," said Currie.
"It's got the biggest brain. It has eyes that face forward in a way that gave it binocular vision. And now we know they were feathered."
In other parts of the world, teeth of a similar dinosaur have been found with serrations as big as those of a T. Rex's tooth.
"We still haven't got a complete specimen [of the Troodon formosus] anywhere in the Western North America. It's crazy," he said.
"I would love to see them just to learn from it and see what we got right and what we got wrong."
The Troodon can be seen in a death pose in the logo of a museum named after Currie in Wembley in northern Alberta.
The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum is marking its 10-year anniversary next year by exhibiting its recent and largest discovery in northern Alberta so far — the skull of a pachyrhinosaurous. The skull alone is the size of a baby elephant.
The Wembley centre is among several museums Currie has helped build in Canada and around the world, including China and Japan, as dinosaur research boomed over the course of his career.
It began when he was a 12-year-old growing up in Ontario, reading the Roy Chapman Andrews book "All About Dinosaurs" and dashing through the Royal Ontario Museum, looking at all the dinosaur displays, confident he would one day hunt some of his own.
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