Nature
The Dinosaur Park Formation in southern Alberta is a Late Cretaceous unit of the Belly River Group, formed about 76.5 to 74.4 million years ago in river-fed floodplains, swamps, and coastal lowlands as the Bearpaw Sea advanced. Exposed in the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, it records a transition from inland environments to marine conditions through sandstones, mudstones, bentonite, and the Lethbridge Coal Zone. It is one of North America’s most important dinosaur-bearing formations, preserving abundant plants and animals as well as changing dinosaur faunas through the sequence. Since the 1870s, discoveries here have made it central to Canadian paleontology.
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Alberta · Canada
