To understand why Phil Currie stands shaking on top of a ridge in a desolate Canadian wilderness, contemplating whether to drag himself to the next ridge hundreds of yards away and risk dying of dehydration or to turn back, you need to know only one scene from his childhood: He is six years old, sitting at the kitchen table. He opens a box of Rice Krispies and out plops a plastic dinosaur. Imagination shifts into high gear and the rest of little Phil's life is defined in a moment by creatures that have never been seen by humans. "I was hooked," he says. "They were real. They weren't mythology. They were the biggest, the strongest, the fastest."
So that is why he is here, in Alberta's badlands, with the temperature pushing above 105, shading his eyes against the searing sun with one hand and thrashing at blackflies with the other, studying the desolate landscape of fissured earth.
He opens a leather satchel and pulls out a photograph taken by another fossil hunter nearly 90 years earlier. He looks at the ridge, looks at the photo, looks at the ridge. "You shouldn't do it," he mutters to himself. "That's just nuts. You should go back to camp." Indeed the rest of his group, including his wife, had turned back hours ago.
"For about 15 minutes I kept talking to myself," he remembers. " 'Should I do it? Should I not do it?' I finally decided I had to try." Currie believed the ridge ahead was worth the risk because it might be the site of a nearly forgotten treasure trove of dinosaur bones. And those old fossils could bolster his theory that two-footed carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rex and Albertosaurus traveled in packs, with fleet youngsters driving prey into the powerful jaws of waiting adults.
"Most people have thought of carnivores, especially the big ones, as solitary animals," Currie says. "The idea of ten or so tyrannosaurs coming at you at once is much more scary than thinking about just one. Not so much because of the adults but because of the juveniles. They would have been fast, nasty little animals."
