I'm on a tour in the Badlands, Southern Alberta's best kept secret.

The esthetic beauty of the Badlands is like no other. Cottonwood trees are found in abundance and they support a special group of wildlife: scorpions, black widow spiders and rattlesnakes. But I'm not here to see any of these small creatures. I'm here to see something larger that disappeared long ago from the earth. I'm here to see dinosaurs.

Our first stop is at the tourist information centre. The landscape is a flat, open vista of dusty earth, like something straight out of an old western. Greeting us at the entrance is a large, life-sized dinosaur -- made of plastic of course. But I'm so excited that I take 10 pictures of it and even coax another passenger to take 10 more of me standing next to it.

From here, we head straight to Dinosaur Provincial Park. The park is open year round as the Badlands are considered to be a semi-desert. They have their own weather system and it's not unusual to have temperatures as high as 43 degrees at excavation sites.

The park is a designated World Heritage Site because of the high concentration of fossils found here from the Late Cretaceous period. The World Heritage Site designation is a great honour as it places the Badlands amidst other historical giants like the pyramids of Egypt and the Acropolis in Greece.

We meet our guide and park ranger, Lauren. She's a petite brunette with wild curly hair.

"A big diversity of ancient animals sleep here," she tells us excitedly. "Thirty-nine species of dinosaurs are found here to be exact. If you find a new species, it'll get named after you."

She winks to a little boy in the group.

Lauren takes us through the interpretation centre where we learn that a man by the name of Dawson was the first one to discover dinosaurs in the area, but a fellow named Burtyroll, who was digging for coal, was the first one to publish the information and he got the credit.

From the interpretation site, we board the bus for an hour-long expedition tour of the park. The other tours to choose from are Jackson Wolfe tours and day-long hikes with a conservation officer. Only 20 per cent of the park is accessible to the public, and even then only through a tour.

Before getting off the bus, Lauren makes everyone raise their right hand and repeat after her. "I promise not to sit on a cactus. I also promise not to take any fossils or rocks from the park."

With 90,000 visitors annually, I can see how these are necessary precautions.

We step off the bus onto the desert floor, surrounded by boulders, hoodoos and majestic cottonwood trees.

"We have three rock stars here: sandstone, mudstone and ironstone," states Lauren. "We look at the rocks to learn how the park used to be."

Seventy five million years ago, dinosaurs fell into rivers and were buried into sandstone. As iron, calcite, silica and manganese got mixed in with the sandstone, the rocks turned into fossils. Without these elements, the dinosaur bones would have simply turned into dust.

On my own, I wander off and find two dinosaur vertebrae. I show them to Lauren and she tells me that they call them Leverite, for leave it right there.

"There are so many dinosaur vertebrae bones that we don't even pick them up, so we don't get all that excited about finding one," she tells me.

I stare at her blankly. I'm not sure if she's joking or being serious about the Leverite name.

No matter, I decide. Finding a dinosaur bone is always exciting, especially when it's your first one.

I return the bones to where I had found them and spend the rest of the afternoon looking for a new species, thinking maybe I'd get lucky and have a dinosaur named after me.