60 
It is puzzling why ouch a field as that of the Edmonton and Belly 
River formations, along Red Deer river, Alberta, which has yielded so 
many well-preserved skeletons of dinosaurs, has afforded only one specimen 
of tracks, whereas the Connecticut valley, from which thousands of dino- 
saur tracks have been collected, has yielded very few skeletal remains. 
In the new, Peace River field, likewise, tracks and osseous remains are not 
equally mingled, for though more than four hundred dinosaur tracks were 
observed not even a fragment of bone was found. 
During the field season of 1930, the writer investigated the Peace 
River Canyon locality and collected specimens that would make suitable 
exhibits for the National Museum of Canada. In other cases plaster 
moulds were taken of the tracks or the trackways. 
The writer is indebted to Mr. Neil Gething and his sons, of Hudson 
Hope, B.C., who rendered valuable assistance. Mr. Gething was with 
Mr. McLearn when the original discovery was made and has since located 
other tracks and has done valuable work in protecting them from destruc- 
tion. Miss Alice E. Wilson has given valuable assistance in devising 
generic and specific names used in the following account and Mr. A. Miles 
made the drawings that illustrate it. 
AGE AND ENVIRONMENT 
Peace River canyon in many places has precipitous walls and the 
gorge is very narrow. From the head of the canyon, about 12 miles west 
of Hudson Hope, B.C., the river falls 272 feet before reaching the lower 
end of the canyon at Hudson Hope. In the upper half of the canyon the 
river has cut through the coal-bearing or Gething member of the Bullhead 
Mountain formation. The beds dip at angles of 7 to 15 degrees to the 
south and southwest, and as a result of their attitude and the direction 
followed by the river several hundred feet of the strata are visible along 
the floor of the canyon. These beds at times of high water are covered, 
but at low water they are revealed as rock shelves some of which are 100 
feet or more wide. On these rock shelves more than four hundred dinosaur 
tracks were observed. 
McLearn has correlated these beds with the lower Blairmore 1 of about 
middle Lower Cretaceous age. At the 1930 meeting of the Paleontolo- 
gical Society of America, McLearn, in a short paper on the environment of 
the tracks, stated: “The sandstone layers have ripple-marks, chiefly of the 
symmetrical (wave) type. The shale beds have mud-cracks. They are 
interpreted as the deposits of shallow flood-plain lakes whose bottoms w r ere 
exposed as mud flats at times of low water. It w r as across these flats that 
the tracks w r ere made.” Extensive peat bogs were present and at certain 
periods deposition must have been very slow, for there are a number of 
beds of clean, semi-bituminous coal, one of which, the Grant seam, is nearly 
6 feet thick. 
Dinosaur tracks were observed at various horizons, from the Riverside 
seam 2 upward through more than 500 feet of strata, and for a distance of 
about 3 miles along the river. Time did not permit an examination of the 
1 McLeam, F. H.: Trans. Rov. Soc., Canada (3), vol. XXV, sec. IV, p. 6 (1831). 
*See McLearn’s section, Gool. Surv., Canada, Sum. Rept. 1922, pt. B, pp. 31-36. 
