It is my privilege to begin the volume by discussing the contributions to paleontology made by Charles M. Sternberg, or Charlie, as we called him. It has been said that without his discoveries and his interpretation of them, the magnificent Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology might not exist today.

But C. M. Sternberg was not the first to find and describe the paleontological riches of the Red Deer badlands (Russell 1966). The fossil fields of the Red Deer River valley occur in two main areas (Fig. F.I). One of these is Dinosaur Provincial Park, northeast of Brooks, Alberta. It exposes the Judith River Formation. The other area is the Red Deer River valley from the vicinity of Drumheller northward. Here are displayed the rocks that used to be called the Edmonton Formation. It has now been promoted to group status and divided into a number of formations. There are other places in Alberta where fossil vertebrates occur, and these are also shown in Figure F.1, but none is as spectacular as the Red Deer River valley.

Of Steinberg's predecessors, Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History is noteworthy. He was extraordinarily successful, and by 1912 had amassed a very important collection (Brown 1911). Because of his advanced techniques, he was able to collect many of his specimens as associated skeletons. The Geological Survey of Canada was a bit red-faced about this, because they had known for 21 years that there was a great fossil field here, and had not done much about it.