Fossil

22

When I was a kid, our family drove to Calgary; it was sometime around 1975 I’d guess.

I have no idea what we went to Calgary, but I do remember two or three things about that trip.

We had the truck and camper and towed the boat trailer…minus the boat. My dad put the bicycles on the trailer. I don’t remember riding them at any point, but we must have.

We drove to Calgary and I remember visiting the Calgary Zoo. I don’t actually remember anything about the zoo, but I remember that my brother got sick. I remember Dad pulling a garbage can close to a park bench so that, just in case, if my brother needed to get sick he’d have somewhere to do it into. Then the rest of us left him on the park bench and visited the rest of the zoo. When we came back, he was still on the bench, but the park staff had moved the garbage can back to where it belonged.

The other thing I remember was visiting the Badlands. I’ve been back once, when I went to a conference in Calgary some time around 1998; it’s still one of the most interesting landscapes I’ve ever visited and the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller is one of the most amazing places to have a day disappear on you. The museum didn’t exist when I went there as a kid, and things int he area weren’t as protected as they are now.

The Canadian Badlands stretch east from Drumheller to the Saskatchewan border and south to the United States and this area is home to the largest deposits of dinosaur bones in the world.

If you have ever been to the Badlands you know that it is dry, very dry. The soil is dust and clay. Imagine a landscape composed of dust and clay that rarely sees water….and then throw monsoon like rains onto it.

That’s what I remember as a child, a giant mud-bog.

Needless to say, we didn’t ride the bicycles there.

But we did poke around in the Badlands, and Mom and Dad obviously kept a few things that they found. When Mom passed away there were a few fossils at her house. My brother and I shared them and I kept this one. It bears a striking resemblance to a modern day cedar.

It’s always interesting the stories that a simple piece of rock with the impression of a plant from millions of years ago can hold; the stories can be both ancient and modern.