Phil Currie wanted to be a dinosaur hunter for as long as he can remember. When he was 11, Currie read Andrews’ book All About Dinosaurs, and he was hooked. He was captivated by the life led by dinosaur hunters, and he loved reading about how Andrews battled wild animals and travelled to exotic places to search for evidence of these huge beasts, and then returned to the lab to study them. He knew right away what he wanted to do with his life. ‘I had a fascination with the lifestyle and the animal, this two-legged beast that looks a little bit like us – but is meaner,’ he says.
Currie’s first quest came when he was a young, six-year-old boy searching for a plastic T. rex in his Rice Krispies cereal box. Each box of cereal had a sticker declaring ‘Free Dinosaurs!’ Currie managed to collect all the other ‘dinosaurs’, although some of the plastic figures were not actually dinosaurs – they were flying reptiles or, in the case of Brontosaurus, misnamed. In the beginning, Currie would dig into the box for the T. rex. When it wasn’t there, he would ask his mother to buy another box. But his mother made him eat the entire box of cereal before she bought another. ‘By the time the end of the promotion came, I had multiple copies of everything and I was sick of the cereal, but I didn’t have the T. rex,’ he says.
Soon, Currie was looking at the genuine article. He regularly visited the Royal Ontario Museum to see dinosaur remains. At the age of 12, his mother arranged for him to meet Bill Swinton, the museum’s director. Swinton was an English scientist who had done some work on dinosaurs and written a number of books on them. He took a liking to the ambitious Currie and introduced him to other palaeontologists. Currie would write to them and ask what classes he should take in high school to put him on the road to becoming a dinosaur hunter.
After several museum visits, Currie realized that most of the dinosaurs in the museum had come from Alberta. In 1961, he convinced his parents to take the family on a trip out west so he could visit actual dinosaur sites. ‘It was great because I got to see the field sights where the specimens were being taken out, but it was a little bit disappointing because I didn’t see this wealth of dinosaur skeletons I imagined were there,’ Currie recalls. ‘I figured that if there are so many dinosaur skeletons in the Royal Ontario Museum and so many specimens were found in Alberta, there must be far more to be seen. Well, there wasn’t because they were all in the eastern museums.’
Often children become interested in dinosaurs when they first see the impressive re-creations, but over time they lose their interest. In Currie’s case, whenever his interest waned he would return to the Royal Ontario Museum and see the real dinosaur skeletons again. By the time he was 12, he had decided that he would move to Alberta and dig dinosaurs when he grew up.
After high school, Currie put himself on a path to becoming a dinosaur palaeontologist. He attended the University of Toronto so he could volunteer in the lab at the Royal Ontario Museum, located on the university’s campus. As a college student, he began working on the dinosaur bones the museum was studying, and he made valuable personal contacts in the field.
By the time he finished his bachelor’s degree, Currie realized that he needed to leave Toronto because there was no one there working full time on dinosaurs or fossil reptiles to mentor him. He studied for his master’s degree at McGill University in Montreal, where noted palaeontologist Bob Carroll became his supervisor. Because Carroll worked primarily on the origin of reptiles, Currie did not focus directly on dinosaurs, but he knew that he could accumulate a base of knowledge and apply it to his dinosaur studies later.
‘Whenever his interest waned Currie would return to the Royal Ontario Museum.’
In 1976, after Currie had started working on his PhD at McGill, he received a call from a former professor of his at the University of Toronto. A job had opened up at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (which became the Royal Alberta Museum in 2005), and the professor encouraged Currie to apply despite the fact that Currie had completed only a year of his doctorate. Although the museum said that it was looking for someone with a PhD, Currie decided to fly to Alberta and attend an interview anyway.
Though other applicants were more qualified Currie was the only candidate who wanted to work specifically on dinosaurs; the others wanted to concentrate on fossil mammals and were only conceding to work on dinosaurs to further their other interests. Luckily for Currie, one of the scientists on the committee that interviewed him was David Spalding, who had a strong interest in the history of palaeontology and subsequently wrote books on hunting for dinosaurs.
‘I had no right to get that job,’ Currie says. ‘There were people that I was competing with who were much better qualified that I was, absolutely no question about it. But when I walked in and did the interview, it was like I became a different person. Subconsciously I was telling myself that this was my job and that I was the best person for it.’
Currie was hired, and with that he became one of a select group of full-time dinosaur palaeontologists in North America. The museum wanted Currie to undertake fieldwork, stage exhibitions and handle education and research. Currie couldn’t have been more motivated. But when he arrived, he discovered that his annual budget was a scant $4,000 – less than the cost of collecting a single dinosaur find. The struggle for research and fieldwork funding began immediately.
Dinosaurs are big and therefore logistically expensive to remove, and for years the financial resources weren’t readily available. The Second World War had wiped out money for most scientific research, and when funding recovered it was funnelled first into medical sciences. Though the public was hungry for information about dinosaurs, the funding simply wasn’t there. Research money went first into fossil fish, small fossil mammals, and anything connected to human origins and the ‘missing link’. For years, palaeontology found itself at the end of a long line, and by the late 1970s there were no more than a dozen full-time dinosaur palaeontologists in the entire world.
‘The large museums like the American Museum of Natural History and the Royal Ontario Museum felt that they already had their wonderful dinosaur displays,’ Currie says. ‘They felt they didn’t need any more, so why should they hire a dinosaur palaeontologist to do it? But the public still loved it. That kind of worked against us too – other scientists would say dinosaurs are popular in the public as kind of a gee-whiz thing, and why should we do research on dinosaurs when they are extinct?’
But the dinosaur renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s changed things. Leading palaeontologists John Ostrom and Dale Russell, followed by Ostrom’s students, Peter Dodson, Jim Farlow and Bob Bakker, were all working on ideas concerning dinosaurs as living animals and discussing them in terms the layperson could understand. ‘Things started to turn around when you started to get a few palaeontologists who were studying dinosaurs and made some rather special finds,’ Currie says. ‘The finds weren’t all that unique, but the way they marketed them was different. These were biologists rather than geologists, so they were looking at things differently.’
As the dinosaur renaissance was getting into its stride, Currie arrived at the Provincial Museum of Alberta in 1976 and staged his own mini-revolution in dinosaur research in Canada. Despite his limited budget, Currie dedicated himself to fieldwork. The odds were against him. The Alberta museum had been looking for years and hadn’t found anything interesting. Many palaeontologists believed that the eastern museums had already taken all the good specimens and there were none left.
There was also the issue of time and manpower. Dale Russell had done a study of the field notes of dinosaur hunters like Barnum Brown working in Alberta from 1910 to 1924 and calculated that, on average, during the golden period when major dinosaur discoveries were being made, it had taken about four man-months of walking to find one good specimen. Therefore, if you had four people searching, it would take one month to find a dinosaur. Currie had just one other person helping him and they would be in the field for only a month. What they needed was some luck.
Currie forged ahead with great determination. He knew early success was critical, and he had some. In his first year, near the Canada–US border, Currie collected a hadrosaurid, or duckbill dinosaur. Based on fossilized footprint evidence, duckbills walked around mostly on their hind legs and would go down on all fours whenever they were feeding. The biomechanics of their bodies