Philip Currie was born in 1949 in Brampton, Ontario, and became interested in dinosaurs as a child after finding a toy dinosaur in a cereal box. He studied zoology at the University of Toronto and then vertebrate paleontology at McGill University under Robert Carroll, before becoming curator of earth sciences at the Provincial Museum of Alberta in 1976.[1]
In the early 1980s, Currie played a lead role in founding what became the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, where he served as curator of dinosaurs. His research has focused heavily on Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park, dinosaur bonebeds -- mass death assemblages that hint at social behavior -- and the evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds.[1]
In the 1980s, Currie became director of the Canada-China Dinosaur Project, the first cooperative paleontological partnership between China and the West since Roy Chapman Andrews's Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s. That collaboration, and his continued work with Chinese colleagues, helped establish that feathers were widespread among theropod dinosaurs. The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, near Grande Prairie, Alberta, opened in 2015 and bears his name.[1][2]