Wembley’s Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum is celebrating a decade of discovery as 2025 marks ten years of operation at the museum.
The official anniversary is in September; however, Museum Curator Dr. Emily Bamforth says this year is a time of reflection, where staff and visitors alike can look back on ten years of dinos.
“ Ten years, of course, is a big anniversary, it means that we’ve been here 10 years, hooray for us, and we’re still going,” she says. “ We’re at the point now where we’re starting to do some really amazing things, like finding Big Sam, for example, our big Pachyrhinosaurus skull in the fall.”
Bamforth says while spirits are high among museum staff, residents can be excited too. She says the past ten years of work have established the Grande Prairie region, and even Northern Alberta as a whole, as a staple in the paleontology community.
“It’s also a triumph for the local community as well, there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that went into having this facility built, so when it was opened, it was huge for the Grande Prairie area, the county, all of northern Alberta, to be able to showcase the amazing paleontology resources we have up here,” she says.
Bamforth began her tenure as Museum Curator in January 2022 and says after three years, she continues to look forward to new discoveries in the future.
“To me, it’s been such an incredible experience, this is an amazing place to work, we have incredible fossil resources here, the Pipestone Creek Bone Bed, which is one of the densest dinosaur deposits in North America, if not the world is literally right in our backyard, it’s a 20-minute drive from the museum,” she says.
The Curator says the fun doesn’t stop at the Pipestone Creek Bone Bed though. She says her team has discovered new sites, showing promise for new excavations and maybe even new discoveries in the near future.
“ In addition to the Pipestone Creek Bone Bed, we also work other sites as well, we’ve discovered new sites, one significant bone bed down in the MD of Greenview, which potentially has a new species of dinosaur in it,” she says. “ We’ve been able to work at these new sites we’ve discovered, new fossil plant sites, that’s one of my kind of big areas of interest is these fossil leaves that tell us about the climate back then.”
The museum has also gained significant interest in recent years. Bamforth credits the museum’s involvement in the BBC documentary “Walking With Dinosaurs” with shining a light on paleontology in Alberta’s north.
“They’re making a follow-up to that, and our Pipestone Creek Bombed is one of the sites that’s featured in that, so that’s going to be really exciting,” she says. “ We’re really starting to drive some international interest in dinosaurs up here.”
When it comes to the future of the museum’s operations, Bamforth says lots of exciting developments are on the way. First, on the operational side, Bamforth says the museum will continue trying to make a name for itself on a larger scale.
“One of our goals is always to get more visitation, not only from the Grande Prairie area but from elsewhere as well, we would ultimately really love to be kind of like the Royal Tyrell Museum of the North,” she says.
On the research side, Bamforth says several projects are underway, including the Big Sam discovery. Outside of Big Sam, the Curator says the region is filled with new, significant fossil sites, which could house the remains of some more “kingly” specimens.
“ We would love to find a Tyrannosaur, we know up here in northern Alberta we have a big Tyrannosaur, not a T Rex, our rocks are too old for T Rex, but we know there’s a big one out here,” she says. “We’ve never found skull material so we don’t know which Tyrannosaur we have whether it’s Albertosaurus or Gorgosaurus or an unknown species so that’s one of our big goals is to really find more material from this Tyrannosaur and really to figure out what it is.”
Additionally, Bamforth says personally, she wishes to explore even more of northern Alberta in hopes of making discoveries as far north as Fort Vermillion and Peace River.
