Joseph Burr Tyrrell
Tyrrell, Joseph Burr (1858-1957) was a Canadian geologist and explorer whose work led to much of what is known about the western and northern regions of Canada. His surveys greatly impacted coal and gold mining in Canada, and he also made a significant discovery of dinosaur remains there.
Tyrrell was born in 1858 in Ontario, Canada, and attended Upper Canada College in Toronto. He then enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he studied chemistry, biology, mineralogy, and geology. He excelled in these subjects and graduated with honors. He studied law before switching to geology. His first job was as a field assistant with the Geological Survey of Canada, and in 1883 he surveyed and mapped the area of the Crows Nest, Kootenay, and Kicking Horse passes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
In 1884, Tyrell began a geological survey of the Cretaceous coal and mineral deposits in the foothills of Alberta between Calgary and Edmonton. On June 9, 1884, while examining exposed rocks in the Drumheller region, he discovered the remains of a dinosaur, the first discovery of its kind in Canada. In his field notes, he wrote that he had found a “large and fairly perfect head of a gigantic carnivore.” In fact, the partial skull belonged to a new genus of dinosaur that later was called Albertosaurus. Three days later, on June 12, he discovered one of Canada's largest coal deposits nearby.
Using as a guide the maps and journals of Samuel Hearne, who explored northeast Canada in the 1770's, Tyrrell plotted an expedition through the arctic desert west of Hudson Bay known as the Barren Lands. Prior to the 1880's not much was known of northern Canada, except for information from the two early explorers and indigenous Indians and Inuit. In 1893, Tyrrell's team, which included his younger brother, James, began at Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan, and journeyed to Hudson Bay through northern Manitoba to Itinnipeg and back home. The trip was plagued by severe storms and food shortages, and had there not been vast herds of caribou, Tyrrell and his crew might have starved. Tyrrell's accurate maps and reports of the Barren Lands provided authoritative accounts of a region that had been largely unexplored.
Tyrrell was also a naturalist, and he provided a detailed catalogue of Canadian mammals, descriptions of winter homes of the caribou, and a description of conifers and their distribution. His geological surveys led him to believe that the Canadian ice age had not been composed of a single mass of ice, as was believed at that time. In 1897, he presented his hypothesis to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that “glaciation had formed and radiated out to cover vast stretches of the continent on several occasions.” Tyrrell's theory that three major Pleistocene ice sheets—the Laradorean, the Patrician, and the Keewatin—had covered northern and eastern Canada became widely accepted and his reputation as a geologist grew.
In 1898, he resigned from the Geological Survey and went to the Yukon where the Klondike Gold Rush was at its peak. He spent the next seven years as a geological and mining consultant. In the early 1900's he was instrumental in the development of mining of silver and cobalt in northern Ontario, and from 1910 to 1924 he served as resident agent for the Anglo-French Mining Company of London.
In 1924, Tyrrell arranged financing for the Kirkland Lake Gold Mining Company to further develop the mine. He recalculated the location of the main ore deposit and suggested sinking a new shaft approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) deep and west of the existing shaft. The resulting discovery of high-grade ore led to his being elected president of the company, a post he held until 1955.
Tyrrell was awarded the London Royal Geological Society's Wollaston Palladium Medal in 1947. A mountain, in Alberta, and a town in Manitoba were named for him, and the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology (now the Royal Tyrrell Museum) in Alberta was founded to commemorate his achievements. He died in 1957.