Dinosaur Provincial Park contains one of Alberta’s most fascinating and diverse landscapes – the severely eroded badlands which is the largest tract of badlands in Canada. This unique park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The term "badland' is a translation of mauvaise terre, a description early French traders applied to a similar landscape in North Dakota. Badlands are largely barren areas in which soft rock strata have been rapidly eroded by water and wind into steep slopes and varied, fantastic forms. Here, one can find fantastic rock shapes, stands of plains cotonwood trees, cacti and prairie rattlesnakes. Perhaps most importantly, it boasts one of the most abundant sources of fossils in the world.

About 14,000 years ago, torrential meltwaters from retreating glaciers began to deeply carve this stretch of the Red Deer River Valley. Today, 100 metres of sedimentary bedrock have been exposed from the level prairie to the valley bottom, revealing a geological timeline. The harsh badlands are a far cry from the flat, semi-tropical world that existed here 75 million years ago. This was a coastal plain near the eastern edge of an inland sea. Ferns, mosses and other lush vegetation grew here, supporting a diversity of plant- and meat-eating dinosaurs. The dinosaurs disappeared about 65 million years ago, but their legacy was preserved. During the dinosaur era, rivers from young mountains to the west deposited thick layers of sands, silts, muds and clays that encased and eventually preserved many bones as fossils.