The Royal Tyrrell Museum's Phil Currie has been in the right place at the right time for most of a long and sparkling career as a fossil hunter

By ANDREW PURVIS /THREE HILLS

here were times when Phil Currie was growing up in the suburb of Oakville, outside Toronto, that his mother got so fed up with his compulsive fossil collecting that she threw out his precious trove. Chunks of limestone imprinted with ancient cephalopods and sea squids combed from the rocky shores of Lake Ontario were scooped up and tossed through the back door, along with stacks of comic books depicting fearsome dinosaurs. The boy would head out for more.

Well, no one throws out Currie's finds these days. In upwards of 20 years of work as one of the world's leading paleontologists, Currie has collected or inspected as many fossil remains as anyone else alive. He also helped build a world-renowned museum to house an impressive store of them. Sorry, Mom. Your efforts were in vain.

Along the way, the lanky Ontario native, whose tousled bangs and lean frame belie his 49 years, has ticked off some major scientific advances, most significantly last week's announcement of the feathered-dinosaur discovery in China. But his reputation has long preceded that, notably acclaim for his work on the anatomy and social relationships of carnivorous dinosaurs. In the small club of those who spend their life digging up and dusting off 100-million-year-old bones, Currie is well known as a tireless and imaginative hunter, a painstaking anatomist and, most recently, the chief proponent of the bird-dinosaur ancestral link, thus placing himself squarely in the middle of the most heated debate in the field. The graduate of the University of Toronto and McGill has also become something of a celebrity. Without going out of his way to court attention, Currie has embraced television, magazines and film as a way of generating new interest in the field. In addition to leading the charge last week for the feathered-dinosaur announcement, Currie has written dozens of popular articles and been the subject of literally hundreds of others worldwide. A number of TV documentaries have explored his work.

Square-jawed good looks and a slightly disheveled manner have helped. Currie was one of the models for paleontologist Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill in Steven Spielberg's dino-epic Jurassic Park. But the curator of dinosaurs at Alberta's Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology is a media hunk only secondarily; he is a scientist first. "Phil is laid back and easygoing, but that attitude masks a tremendous industry," says Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, who has co-authored more than a dozen papers with Currie. "You never know where he'll pop up next." John Ostrom, professor emeritus at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, calls the Canadian "one outstanding scientist." He adds, "Some people are lucky, and some people are not. Phil Currie is lucky. But he has made his luck. He knows where to look and what to look for."

Last week's report in Nature will only cement that reputation. It also marks the possible end of an intellectual pilgrimage by Currie that began in the 1980s with his work on a little dinosaur known as a troodont, which lived 75 million years ago. While examining those fossils, Currie had to keep reminding himself that this was a relative of T. rex, not an ancient version of, say, the great blue heron. Soon he began spotting avian similarities elsewhere. "I realized that there were a whole bunch of birdlike characteristics that nobody was aware of." Finally, while visiting Beijing last year, he was handed a small box containing a recently uncovered specimen. "My jaw dropped," he recalls. "Not only was it a complete specimen the size of a turkey, but it also had structures along the back that were featherlike. It wasn't mineralized. It wasn't fungus. It was real." With last week's announcement, Currie believes the argument is over. "It's not that birds are descended from dinosaurs," he says. "It's that birds are dinosaurs."

Paleontology is a rarefied and sparsely populated field; those who do well are almost by definition generalists. Currie certainly has not limited himself to a single line of inquiry. During a career that has taken him from Ellesmere Island to Patagonia, he has explored the social patterns of huge meat-eating dinosaurs, identified two duck-billed dinosaurs, investigated flying reptiles and uncovered some of the first dinosaur eggs--in China. He's also helped create an encyclopedia and written two children's books (he's working on a third), and he is currently researching a text on theropods, or flesh-eating dinosaurs. He still found time last year to team up with Microsoft guru Nathan Myhrvold to construct a computer model that shows how giant dinosaurs known as sauropods used their tails as massive bullwhips, actually breaking the sound barrier with each thunderous swish--perhaps as a warning or terror tactic to panic enemies.

Until recently, Currie was perhaps best known for the museum he helped create, the Royal Tyrrell, just a few kilometers outside Drumheller, Alta., but with a reputation that stretches around the world. The Tyrrell was completed in 1985 in the last days of the oil boom. It overlooks the bone-rich badlands of the Red Deer River and is situated near one of the world's paleontological treasures, Dinosaur Provincial Park, which was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1979 and is home to millions of bones representing at least 35 species. The museum's 29,000 sq k encompass cavernous display halls filled with fearsome models and towering skeletons, as well as rack upon rack of storage shelves where more than 100,000 specimens, most of them collected by Currie and his team, await sorting and further study. The Tyrrell and nearby Drumheller get more than 400,000 visitors yearly, drawn by the lure of dinosaurs. The museum often plays host to American, Chinese and Japanese delegations planning similar displays. Jack Horner, a top dinosaur expert based in Montana, calls the Tyrrell "a fantastic resource" and adds, "It's largely Phil's work that created it."

Currie has another claim to fame: he was a pioneer in working with Chinese scholars, thereby gaining access to specimens and dinosaur sites such as those where Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx were found. These, he believes, will become the most important digs in the world in the next 20 years. The relationship dates back to the mid-1980s, when word seeped out of the tightly controlled Chinese scientific community that local researchers were prepared to establish a collaboration with Western counterparts. Currie quickly put together a proposal that in 1986 culminated in the Canada-China Dinosaur Project, the largest paleontological expedition ever and the most notable occasion in the modern era in which any Western dinosaur hunters were permitted into China. Six other teams had competed for the prize.

Being in the right place at the right time is a Currie hallmark, along with that luck. On one occasion he dropped his camera case. It rolled down a little gully and came to rest on the skull of a tyrannosaur--part of a complete skeleton. In 1979, in the Peace River region of British Columbia, Currie's team had just completed four seasons of hunting for dinosaur footprints when Currie returned to a site one last time to retrieve some equipment. He came across the spot where a slab of rock had been dislodged the night before by a flash flood; in its place was a hunk of sediment 130 million years old crisscrossed with 170 spidery prints. The boulder is now on display at the Tyrrell. "You can walk over the same ground 25 times and never notice something," he says. "You never know."

That could well be Currie's mantra, and it still has a lot of projected use. For all his achievements, Currie is showing few signs of slowing down. Over the next six months, he and his second wife, Danish paleobotanist Eva Koppelhus, have planned trips to Mongolia, Patagonia, Texas and then back to China to continue work on the feathered dinosaurs. Right after attending press conferences in Washington last week, he returned to a new dig on a cliffside deep in the Alberta badlands,where his team is gently uncovering the remains of nine Cretaceous-period predators known as albertosaurs from an ancient river bed. It appears they were killed by a volcanic eruption or forest fire or similar calamity. Working on a finger bone half submerged in granular rock, Currie notes that only about 1% of dinosaur species in the world have so far been uncovered. "And we keep finding bigger and bigger ones," he says with a grin. Clearly Currie feels his luck has by no means run out. --With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York

PHIL CURRIE

1948 Born in Toronto; later moved to Oakville, Ont.
1972 Earns B.A. from the University of Toronto
1975 Earns M.Sc. from McGill University
1976 Named curator of paleontology at the Provincial Museum of Alberta
1981 Earns Ph.D. from McGill University
1985 Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology completed

CURRIE'S FOSSIL HUNTING GROUNDS

ARCTIC CANADA
Finds include hesperornis, hadrosaur, plesiosaurs

XINGJIANG PROVINCE AND INNER MONGOLIA
Discovery of Asia's largest sauropod, baby pinacosaurs, dinosaur eggs

LIAONING PROVINCE
Feathered dinosaur finds

--With Reporting by Andrea Dorfman /New York