In an assessment of our national verse that is not entirely whimsical, Margaret Atwood has written, 

"Like the poetry of Al Purdy, which in some many ways epitomizes it, Canadian poetry has been very fond of digging things up."

More than any other contemporary Canadian poet, Al Purdy (1918-2000) was able to meld time together with narrative and a strong sense of place. Eschewing the academic penchant for separating life's chronology into isolated segments of history, pre-history and geologic time, Purdy saw these as stages grading together in a seamless continuum. In "Lament for the Dorsets", he ponders the extinction of an Inuit group a mere 600 years ago. For all we know about these people, they might as well have been creatures that lived hundreds of millions of years ago -- archeology transforming into paleontology ....

how could we imagine them in the past
squatting among the moving glaciers
six hundred years ago
with glowing lamps?
As remote or nearly
as the trilobites and swamps
when coal became
or the last great reptile hissed
at a mammal the size of a mouse
that squeaked and fled

In a critical literary analysis of Al Purdy and his poetry, Louis Mackendrick of the University of Windsor notes, "[His] comprehensive focus on time, evolution, pre-history, and the here-and-now were to become the hallmarks of his best poetic achievement". In "A walk on Wellington Street" Purdy commingles episodes from history and paleontology on a stroll along Ottawa's cardinal street. He sees Sir John A. stumbling against a curb and breaking the mickey in his hip pocket. Peering into the slabs of mottled Tyndall stone facing the government buildings, Purdy conjures up a marvellous imagery of fossils in rock -- "the slight painful shudder of life ... thru this clogged and retarded stone". Near the Peace Tower, he pauses to

stare morosely at the sandstone shapes
where fossil worms coffined inside the stone
float in hundred million year sleep
out dying the living people here
in stone hammocks that never arrive.

Like the migrating dinosaurs that appear in many of his poems, Purdy returned (not in spirit, but corporally) again and again to the shores of the Bearpaw Sea -- the seaway that bisected the continent from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico in the Late Cretaceous. In "Lost in the Badlands", Purdy observes the mass extinction that brought an end to the dinosaurs dominance,

..... next morning
The Great Dying began
until nothing of any size remained
but some scampering rodents
a few half-assed mammals
still trying to say something
back there at the end of the Cretaceous.

Further reading:

The Great Dying began Purdy, Al.
1968:  The Great Dying began Wild Grape Wine. McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

The Great Dying began Purdy, Al.
1984:  The Great Dying began
Piling Blood. McClelland and Stewart Ltd.