Keeping track of the thousands of fossil discoveries in Dinosaur Provincial Park can be a challenge for Paleontologists but now technology is helping them to keep track of the finds from the air.
Researchers are using a drone and GPS to map out the bone beds in the area.
“We’re using fancier technology now, we’re using drones, we’re using GPS. We’re still using picks and shovels. We still need to use that hardware to get the animals out so that hasn’t changed at all in the last 100 years but the new technology is just adding to that. It’s not replacing it, it’s just adding to the current methods,” said Paleontologist Caleb Brown.
Data collected from the ground and air is converted into a digital format and layered to create large scale maps.
“We’re combining hand-held, really high positioned GPS units, with drones and the actual hard-core bit of digging out the dinosaurs, using the picks, the shovels, the brushes, all of that combined into one project,” said Brown. “There are technologies that exist that can improve our techniques for digging up dinosaurs, mapping out their bone beds and we’re trying to utilize those as much as we can.”
The mapping technology will allow researchers to click on a fossil to find out when it was discovered and to pinpoint its exact location.
“What we’re doing, trying to incorporate the mapping of the bones using high resolution GPS, incorporating that with basically, digital elevation models of landscape, this is a very novel approach in the research of dinosaur bone beds so we're still working out a lot of the bugs, but once we get this working it will be a very efficient way, a very interesting way, to look at the data and it will actually allow us to test really cool hypothesis in dinosaur paleo biology,” said Brown.
Brown says they are not yet at the point of using the drone to find fossils but it is useful for helping to map out existing beds.
“We’re keeping really good records of what was collected when, and that’s partly for our research, but it’s also very useful for public education and for display. We could be able to produce basically a map or an animation that shows the pattern of when we collected these things and how a bone bed is actually collected in kind of a real-time sense,” he said.
Researchers plan to fly the drone again in the next couple of weeks over the Badlands to see if they can work out some of the bugs they discovered on their first flight.
(With files from Kevin Fleming)
