Dr. Phil Currie: The Dinosaur Champion
- Juan-Pablo Pina
- 45 minutes ago
- 11 min read
by JP Pina
For 150 million years, planet Earth was ruled by an awe-inspiring group of special reptiles: dinosaurs. Over the course of their reign, they not only shared then planet with many long-gone creatures like strange crocodile-relatives and flying and marine reptiles, but they also died alongside them. 66 million years after their reign ended, humanity began to harvest the rich and macabre crop of this ancient world, with a few men and women becoming as famous as the dragons they uncovered.
When I went to Alberta, Canada, I got to meet one such scientist: Dr. Philip J. Currie. And while he may not have been the first person to describe a dinosaur (that title goes to Gideon Mantell who named Megalosaurus in 1827), his work has championed the creatures that came before in ways that would revolutionize not only the way we view dinosaurs, but also the story of life on Earth.
Part I. The First Dragon Encounters
Dr. Phil Currie wasn’t always a dinosaur kid. However, his first encounter with the dragons of the past changed that.
“...It started with a Rice Krispies box and a plastic Dimetrodon. Of course, Dimetrodon is not a dinosaur, it’s a mammal-like reptile so to speak, but it was the beginning. That’s what started my interest in dinosaurs when I was six. I really wanted to collect the whole set [of plastic Rice Krispies dinosaurs] of eight. But they were smart and made the T. rex very hard to get so that people would buy more Rice Krispies and my parents were the kind to say ‘Well the plastic prize is at the bottom of the box, you have to eat the whole box first’. So I went through box after box after box of Rice Krispies, and to this day I can’t eat Rice Krispies anymore as a cereal." -Dr. Philip J. Currie
But it didn’t stop there. As one day, he discovered what could be called his “Book of Dragons”.
“When I was 11 I stepped on a nail and was confined to the classroom during recess and lunch, and at the back of the room I found this book by Roy Chapman Andrews. It’s called ‘All About Dinosaurs’ but it’s really about what it’s like to be a paleontologist, and Andrews was very good at describing dinosaurs but also [his] expeditions from the American Museum of Natural History to Mongolia.” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
The book, which read like a medieval bestiary (and still does), told of ancient worlds where huge flying reptiles soared over deserts and swamps dominated by animals with bizarre ornaments and proportions. But it also told of the “cemeteries” where these ancient worlds lay, places on Earth that would seem almost like the graveyard of Isla Nublar. And it was then that Currie knew his quest: track down the dragon graveyards and learn anything and everything. And not only would his quest go far beyond what he (or, to be frank, anyone else) imagined, but he would be one of the pioneers charting a course to a whole new way of seeing the beasts of the past.
Part II. Becoming a Dragon Master
An important factor to take into account when discussing Dr. Phil Currie’s story is where he was born and raised. While some may have to use convoluted genetic technology and break various ethical rules in order to see dinosaurs (a la Jurassic Park) or use colliders to welcome them into our world via wormholes (a la Primitive War), Currie had to do no such thing as his backyard was like a dragon graveyard.
80 million-66 million years ago, much of western North America was a tropical swampland not unlike the Florida Everglades of today. Fern prairies, forests, shorelines and wetlands covered this prehistoric world that housed monsters. Alberta, Canada in specific sits on what is now recognized as several layers in the geologic record including the Wapiti Formation (80-68 million years ago), the Oldman Formation (77.5-76.5 million years ago), the Dinosaur Park Formation (76.5-74.4 million years ago), the Bearpaw Formation (75-72 million years ago) the Horseshoe Canyon Formation (~73.1-68 million years ago) and many others. Each of these layers, characterized by telltale signs of environmental changes, is beholden to the remains of a terrifying and beautiful roster of ancient life. Charismatic creatures like Albertosaurus, Borealopelta, Centrosaurus, Cryodrakon, Edmontosaurus, Ornithomimus and Prognathodon shared an Edenic world that managed to preserve them all in exquisite detail thanks to the composition of the environment that both buried them quickly and kept their remains safe for the following 80-66 million years. In fact, the province of Alberta alone is host to 5% of the species that make up the clade Dinosauria (which is quickly approaching the 1,000+ mark). Not a bad place to start when you’re hoping to become a master in natural history.
And, as the years rolled out, Currie took opportunity after opportunity, landing himself job after job until he “stepped into the shoes” of people like Roy Chapman Andrews, the Sternbergs and even Barnum Brown (all of which famous fossil-hunters).
“...I think one of the reasons I got to where I am is because of how competitive I am. I just took every opportunity and, well, here I am.” -Dr. Philip J. Currie.
And he’s not wrong. While films like Jurassic Park have painted paleontology as exclusively for bone-diggers who can put up with the stinging desert heat, it’s a highly multidisciplinary field. Even at a college level climatology, entomology, environmental science, geology and zoology are all field that meet and mingle to try and not just uncover the bones, but also reveal what the surroundings on the bones tell us and what nearby remains and signs reveal about the everchanging planet these organisms lived on. And even seemingly trivial skills like algebra, chemistry, dataset-building, geometry, statistics and writing can make-or-break one’s efforts to get a career in the world of paleontology. Another paleontologist, Dr. Carry Woodruff of the Philip and Patricia Frost Science Museum (who also co-authored the graphic novel “Sauropods: The Largest Animals to Ever Walk the Earth”), even had a say in the matter when I went to speak with him in the preparation lab:
“You can’t just say ‘Oh, I wanna study dinosaurs, I wanna just do this’. I hate to say it, but the classes you don’t want to take are the ones that will help you out the most. Math, statistics, chemistry…I remember I had to do three-dimensional geometry when I was trying to figure out which bones were which and I was like ‘Oh my god!’ Plus, there’s also writing, which is nothing like novels…saying things clearly so that people can understand you in a paper could be the difference wether or not your paper gets published in a journal or even gets read.” -Dr. Carry Woodruff
Eventually, Currie managed to become a professor of dinosaur palaeobiology of the University of Alberta. In fact, when I went to Alberta, our 14 kilometer trek to the Albertosaurus bonebed (a site wherein 20+ individuals of the T. rex-relative Albertosaurus en masse) was accompanied by two students of his who, like Dr. Currie himself, were experts in knowing how to get to the site fastest and safest and even zeroing in on an Albertosaurus tooth with near-military precision.
And while finding new fossils at a site are great, it’s not the highlight of his career. Instead, Dr. Currie not only managed to become a master in the field of dragon-finding, but he (quite literally) rewrote the story of Dinosauria as well as our understanding of them…
Part III. Re-Writing the Dinosaur Story
Our understanding of the dinosaurs and their world is always changing. If the Chinese who believed dinosaur fossils were dragon bones saw the modern reconstructions of animals like Utahraptor, they’d probably label them as some variety of feathered serpent or feathered demon. But even today, Dinosauria is getting makeover after makeover, and Dr. Currie has been a part of a few of those…
“Of course, during the Dinosaur Renaissance a lot of new ideas were put forward. One of them was that dinosaurs were related to birds. And people thought it was stupid because until then dinosaurs were stupid and slow creatures that lived in swamps.” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
After World War II (which had put a halt on all paleontological research and attention), many new ideas about what dinosaurs were arose. Especially after the discovery of the raptor dinosaur Deinonychus, there was growing evidence to not only suggest that non-avian dinosaurs were smarter and more active than we had thought but also that there was a link between them and birds (which we now recognize as avian dinosaurs).
Paleontologist John Ostrom was not only the man who discovered and described Deinonychus, but was also one of the people who spearheaded the idea that dinosaurs were way more than we first thought. He suggested that they had a warm-blooded metabolism like those of birds and mammals as well as that dinosaurs were directly related to birds, eventually theorizing that some dinosaurs may have had feathers. Alas, he was often ridiculed for his theories. Until one very special day when the remains of a single animal proved everything (and more) right.
From 1986 to 1991, paleontologists from Canada and China began to “switch places” once a hefty amount of evidence suggested that the dinosaurs from each country were very similar, leading to the very natural question of “Why?”. Thus expeditions were carried out across Alberta, Montana, Sichuan, the Arctic Circle, the Gobi Desert and Xinjiang in a colossal international quest to understand one of the most mysterious and captivating times and organisms in Earth’s history. Among the finds were 66 primitive horned dinosaurs in a single site, a dinosaur's braincase, the discovery of Alxasaurus, the discovery of five juvenile armored dinosaurs, the discovery of Mamenchisaurus, the discovery of Monolophosaurus and the discovery of Sinraptor. But there was one find in particular that would change (almost literally) everything.
“The amazing thing, though, was that when we started the Canada-China Dinosaur Project is that it gave me opportunities I didn’t have before, and one of them was to see the first feathered dinosaur…called Sinosauropteryx. It’s an animal that just had a huge impact. It’s not that the idea was new, again, people like Bob Bakker had already said that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. And dinosaurs may have had feathers, right?...they’re directly ancestral to birds.” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
Sinosauropteryx lived in the temperate forests of what is now Liaoning Province, China from 124.6-122 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous. It was only about the size of a cat, and it was related to other small therapods (two-legged dinosaurs) like Compsognathus. The unique thing about Sinosauropteryx is that the fossil, a slab of Chinese rock that was once a lakebed, perfectly preserves its feathers. This one animal singlehandedly proved that everything John Ostrom and other paleontologists like Bob Bakker and even Dr. Currie himself was proven right.
In fact, during the SVP (Society of Vertebrate Paleontology) meeting of 1995, when Ostrom was in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Dr. Currie presented Ostrom with images of the Sinosauropteryx fossil.
“Well, considering what the fossil did and his [Ostrom’s] theories, I’m pretty sure a tear or two formed in his eyes.” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
But even the Sinosauropteryx wasn’t the only example of Dr. Currie practically rewriting the dinosaurs’ story. The fossil of a raptor dinosaur called Sauronitholestes (specifically specimen UALVO 55700) preserves a huge sharp bone caught in its neck, and when compared to modern animal behavior like that of Komodo dragons, it shows that sometimes dinosaurs “had eyes bigger than their stomachs”. Not only that, but entire “dinosaur graveyards” have been found by Currie and his teams, like a site that preserves 20+ Albertosaurus (a smaller and earlier relative of T. rex). And there was even another dinosaur with evidence for feathers, a complete Struthiomimus (ostrich-like dinosaur) with little pinpricks on its arms that were where feathers once were.
But after garnering so much fame in the field of Dinosauria, eventually Dr. Currie got asked one particular question: “Why?”
Part IV. The Reason Behind the Dragon-Hunt
So…why?
Why spend so many years hunting the remains of dragons in the most remote places on Earth when you could spend that time doing literally anything else? Well, for one thing, their bring in a heck of a lot of money!
“I think dinosaurs have a much greater impact on people than even paleontologists realize sometimes…And with the opening of the Tyrrell Museum, I realized that they have an unbelievable economic impact.” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
In September of 1985, Alberta’s official dinosaur museum: the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology (named after Joseph B. Tyrrell, the first person to discover dinosaur fossils in Alberta in the form of the T. rex-relative Albertosaurus). This was also around the time that dinosaurs were becoming popular again, and considering that Alberta is practically the grave of Isla Sorna, the museum would become a palace to be inhabited by the cadavers of its indigenous dragons and wyverns.
“We can make a direct correlation between how many dollars this museum has made and the cost of building the museum. And in that case, it ended up being that the museum payed for itself in tourist dollars in two years, two years!” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
In 2023, the museum hosted 526,000 visitors, a record-breaker. And this wasn’t the only time the museum would “go off-the-charts”. In the first opening months, so many people visited the museum that, according to Dr. Currie, “...the car lines got up to seven kilometers long, so people had to walk from their cars to the museum.” But even then you have to ask, “Why do people like dinosaurs?”.
“Well, I was the kid who never grew up…I always liked dinosaurs...For a long time in my career that was one of the most common questions: ‘Why are dinosaurs important?’...‘Why do you want to study them?’...Of course, I have a lot of reasons why I study them, because I like them!” -Dr. Philip J. Currie
There are many reasons as to why dinosaurs (or natural history in general) fascinate us, and many fellow paleontologists have pondered the question as well. Paleontologist Dr. Darren Naish, notable for his Tetropod Zoology weblog and many publications like the discovery of Ceratosuchops (a crocodile-faced dinosaur from Europe) and his books like Cryptozoologicon and All Yesterdays, discussed humankind’s fascination with prehistoric life in his book “Dinopedia: A Brief Compendium of Dinosaur Lore”.
For one, they look cool. These were animals with aesthetically interesting faces, bony scutes, column-like legs, feathers, frills, hammer-like tails, horns, interesting postures, muscular arms often tipped with meathook-like talons, sleek lines and spikes. In a way, we perceive dinosaurs as “super-animals”. You don’t have to be a scientist to look at the skeleton of a dinosaur and realize these animals were biological powerhouses. The long legs of these beasts show that they were typically muscular and swift like a supercharged mammal or bird but with a reptilian coat. The forms of the neck and skull have a sense of awe and anatomical prowess that demonstrates acute senses, respiratory prowess and mastery of finding and eating their preferred foods. And the great size of the body cavity, the depth, length and width of the shoulder and hip girdles is surely linked to the presence of a metabolic powerhouse to fuel those great jaws, enormous limbs and grand tails.
But the thing that elephants, giraffes, most birds, pandas, rhinos, sharks, tigers and whales all have in common (outside of the fact that they’re all amazing) is the fact that they and their habitats are all under threat. Obviously, though, organisms of the deep past lived in a human-free world. And considering that we like to think of great creatures living in vast and natural frontiers (a la Lord of the Rings, a la Wings of Fire), thinking of prehistoric life removes any sense of guilt we might feel when pondering modern species. It’s not hard to imagine ancient wildlife doing battle, eating, growing up, killing, massing in great herds, mating, playing, living and dying in a beautiful and untamed world. But there’s probably one more layer to our obsession with prehistoric life: We ask a ton of questions.
More questions are asked about dinosaurs than about any other group of animals. What colors were they? How smart were they? How did they hunt? How did they treat their young? What were their adornments used for? What did they sound like? What did they look like in life? What were the true causes for their extinction? And from dinosaurs, we often see a through-line wherein dinosaurs act almost like a “gateway drug” to other scientific disciplines. They’re mysterious and we don’t fully understand them, and we, as humans, are drawn to understand the ununderstandable.
So as our understanding reveals more about the ancient world and its inhabitants, paleontologists like Dr. Currie march on in their quests to keep learning and understanding. And with each new nugget of knowledge, whether by skeleton or broken tooth, we can get just a little closer to painting a picture of how we fit into the story of our prehistoric planet.