J.B. Tyrrell spent most of his long career as a geologist, explorer and entrepreneur on the Canadian Shield. However, in 1884 his first field work was in Cretaceous strata along the Red Deer River where his discovery of a skull of the tyrannosaur Albertosaurus provided a name to the paleontological museum in Drumheller.

Joseph Burr Tyrrell was not a paleontologist and he claimed no priority in the discovery of dinosaurs in the Red Deer River Valley. And yet, it is his name that is attached to the premier paleontological museum in North America -- the one with a major focus on Red Deer Valley dinosaurs -- the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller.

The scientific discovery of dinosaurs in what is now southern Saskatchewan and Alberta was made in 1874 by George Mercer Dawson, the Canadian representative on the International Boundary Commission which was charged with examining the territory along the 49th Parallel. In 1881, an unexpected decision by the Canadian Pacific syndicate changed the subsequent settlement and development patterns of the prairies. Sandford Fleming's surveyed route of the CPR main line across the West -- one to go follow the fertile valley of the North Saskatchewan through Battleford, Edmonton and then the Yellowhead Pass -- was abandoned and replaced by a new route through the arid belt 300 kilometres to the south. The future cities of Regina, Medicine Hat, Calgary and Banff owe their existence to the CPR's decision -- as did many new discoveries of dinosaurs in the Red Deer River valley..

The Geological Survey of Canada had only sketchy information about the geology and distribution of coal along this new southern route. To rectify this, Dawson who joined the Survey in 1881, was immediately sent west to investigate the geology of the Bow and Belly rivers area. He was assisted by the geologist Richard McConnell, the fossil collector Thomas Weston and by a recent arts graduate from the University of Toronto, Joseph Tyrrell. From 1881-83 Dawson's party mapped and gathered information in advance of the CPR surveyors on the plains and along the front of the mountains. They identified many coal deposits and, incidentally, located a number of fossil sites, some with dinosaurs.

With little formal geological education and less field experience, at the age of 26 Tyrrell was surprised to be given charge of his own field party. In 1884, he set out to investigate the geology of the area north of the Bow River that had been assigned to him. He hired three men and canoed down the Red Deer River to examine the Cretaceous exposures. Later that summer he discovered a relatively intact skull of a large carnivorous dinosaur near present-day Drumheller. At the time there were no paleontologists in Canada knowledgeable about dinosaurs. Professor E.D. Cope of Philadelphia identified the skull as Laelaps incrassatus, but in 1905 Henry Fairfield Osborne of the American Museum of Natural History proposed that this skull be the type of new genus and species -- Albertosaurus sarcophagus. Albertosaurus, a slightly smaller cousin of Tyrannosaurus, is now the marquee specimen of the museum in Drumheller named for J.B. Tyrrell.

The discovery of the Albertosaurus skull signalled the end of Tyrrell's connection with dinosaurs and the Red Deer River valley. He is well-known in geographic circles in Canada for completing two epochal expeditions across the Barren Lands of the District of Keewatin in the early 1890s. In 1899, after a disagreement with GSC Director George M. Dawson over his salary, he quit the Survey to become a mining consultant in the Klondike. Later, he became a millionaire as a result of his successful management of gold mines at Kirkland Lake, Ontario. He was then able to indulge his passion about the history of exploration in Canada. Tyrrell resurrected David Thompson's legacy by editing his journal which was published by the Champlain Society.

Further reading:

Spalding, David.
2000:  Into the Dinosaurs' Graveyard: Canadian Digs and Discoveries. Doubleday Canada, 305 p.