Named after Canada’s leading Palaeontologist Dr. Philip Currie — one of the foremost professional voices around the globe – the new museum honours his lifelong commitment to the discovery and study of palaeo-heritage. However, the story begins when a young school teacher by the name of Al Lakusta stumbled upon something exciting while out on a nature walk one day at Pipestone Creek. His findings that day in 1974 would eventually be identified as bones of a yet to be discovered species Pachyrhinosaurus – a type of horned dinosaur, which subsequently was re-christened Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai after Lakusta.
In the meantime, palaeontologists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, including Dr. Currie, had started travelling to the area to excavate these intriguing fossils. They examined the area identified by Lakusta and soon realized that there were thousands of bones in an area as large as several football fields; in fact, this bone bed was a mass grave where hundreds of dinosaurs of all ages died, creating one of the densest sites in the world.
Following this initial discovery, other finds in the area include hadrosaurs (duck billed dinosaurs), tyrannosaurs (predatory dinosaurs), nodosaurs (armoured dinosaurs), plesiosaurs (marine reptiles) and pterosaurs (flying reptiles), to name a few.