Cretaceous

By the Cretaceous (140-65 million years ago) the climate in British Columbia was much warmer than now, and there were no dry zones (Basinger and McIver, in Ludvigsen, 1996). There were tall coniferous forests, much like today’s moist forest types, but in the lowlands were extensive swamps of cycads, ferns, seed ferns and ginkos. These swamps, as in the Carboniferous, built up massive layers of plant detritus which was later covered by sediments and then transformed by heat and pressure into coal. Today, we can find plant fossils in the coal-bearing rocks in Crowsnest Pass. Our coal industry mines those same plants. Although dinosaurs thrived on the lush vegetation and mild climate, only one dinosaur bone has been found in the Columbia Basin. In 1979, in a small display of coal pebbles in the office of Crow’s Nest Industries in Fernie, a single toe bone was found of an ornithopod, or bird-footed, dinosaur (Sampson and Currie, in Ludvigsen, 1996). Dinosaurs did, however, leave tracks - footprints preserved in coal (originally swamp) layers in a mine near Michel and in sandstone layers between coal layers at Fernie and Elkford. Another trackway, consisting of many sets of tracks of several dinosaur species, was found in a sandstone cliff over the Narraway River. By late Cretaceous, the dinosaur species of North America were essentially identical to those of central Asia. The familiar dinosaur groups of Alberta - tyrannosaurs, hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs and ceratopsids - originated in central Asia and later migrated to North America across a land bridge between the two continents. Although the fossil record is lacking, we can assume that these species lived in the Columbia Basin because they were widespread and the habitat was suitable.