The Drumheller Badlands

Origin Of The Name

Badlands are landscapes that are intricately eroded, steeply sloped, largely devoid of vegetation and characterized by narrow, winding channels and gullies.

The term badlands is a translation from les mauvaises terres, words coined by early French trappers and traders traveling the rough terrain of the White River area in North Dakota. Earlier in history, Sioux Indians also referred to the barren and rugged landscape of South Dakota as Mako Sika meaning land bad.

How The Badlands Formed

Although the Drumheller badlands have a strange look of an alien or ancient world, this is not the kind of world the dinosaurs inhabited. When the dinosaurs reigned, 230 million to 65 million years ago, this area was a series of deltas and river flood plains extending east into a warm, shallow inland sea.

The tracts of badlands, extending along the Red Deer River Valley eastwards from Red Deer City through Drumheller to the Saskatchewan border, were carved by melt water torrents in the wake of retreating ice sheets, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Evidence suggests spillways were the result of flash floods rather than rivers, which carve out valleys progressively over a long period of time.

Erosion has created many unusual landscape features such as hoodoos, temporary pillars of rock with protective caps of harder rock; glacial erratics, freestanding boulders; mud drapings, hardened mud which looks like icing slipping off a cake; ephemeral creeks, small rivulets which come and go with the rain; and sink holes, unexpected openings into caverns.

One of the most striking features of the Drumheller badlands are the multicoloured, flat-lying layers of exposed rock on the surrounding slopes. With the exception of a visible top soft later, all the rock layers date back to the Late Cretaceous, a period of time just before the demise of the dinosaurs. Layers from subsequent time periods have been scraped off by natural processes.

Most of southern Alberta is underlain by alternating layers of sedimentary strata - sandstone, mudstone and coal sequences alternate which shale sequences. The shale sequences indicate times when an eastern inland sea periodically extended over what is now Alberta.

The sediments were deposited by the action of ancient rivers, swamps and floods.

Following burial and a long passage of time, these sediments were converted into sedimentary rock of the Late Cretaceous Age, 75 to 65 million years ago. Then these layers were buried beneath layers from more recent time periods.

In the Drumheller badlands, these more recent layers are not present. Erosion was accelerated during the Ice Ages by four glacial advances and retreats. But the glaciers did leave their own telltale layer of unconsolidated sediments. Formed during the Pleistocene Epoch, the uppermost layer of the valley walls varies in thickness from less than a metre to a hundred metres. Between the Pleistocene and the Late Cretaceous layers is a time gape of at least 64 million years.

The exposed sedimentary rock layers along the Red Deer River Valley around Drumheller are referred to as the Horseshoe Canyon Formation. Black layers are coal seams. Dark gray layers are mudstone. Lighter gray layers are sandstone. As these layers continue to erode, fragments of dinosaur bone, petrified wood and are other fossils are exposed. Some 25 species of dinosaurs have been discovered in these badlands since 1884 when Joseph Burr Tyrrell, the Museum's namesake, discovered the first Albertosaurus skull.

This document was prepared by Wayne Hortensius, Calgary, Alberta, Canada for the Royal Tyrrell Museum Cooperating Society. All information © 1995 Royal Tyrrell Museum. All Rights Reserved.
Updated: April 8, 1995

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