This is a fairly current aerial photo of the Rouge Beach. It didn't look like this when I was a kid in the 1970's. People used to drive under the railway bridge and use the beach. There was some parking there. I can remember a little building which had a public washroom. It's still a very long beach. Though ownership has changed and I don't know if some of it is blocked off now. I do know the road going under the bridge was closed off. Now you can park on the other side.

I can see a large building on the beach side now. It was not there before. I've never seen it up close to know what it is.

On the marshy side, there is a lot more parking than there ever was before. It looks strange to see it. Before it was mainly just a dirt road with the marshy area right at the road, just a foot or so from the road. Cars would park at the side of the road, trying to leave room for other cars driving to the beach. People would go fishing in the marshy water. It used to smell like fish. I wonder if it still does, if there are any fish left. Sometimes herons would fly in too. Frogs, all those wildlife, that likely are not there now.

I don't know what year this photo was taken (Parks Canada). It must be about 2020 I'd guess.

It looks like the bridge is still there, crossing from Rouge Beach into Pickering. It was not an old bridge, built about the time I was in high school, the 1980s. Or not long after that. It was at the narrow part of the water between the beach and the marshy area. It has a long ramp for disabled access which was not there when I last visited the area.

Thank you to Toronto Boris for these images.

The Rouge Beach area was once a popular resort and cottage area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One man even had a vision to build a "Venice of the North" here, though his dreams ultimately never materialized.

In the early 19th century, a growing industrial economy began to surround the predominantly rural areas of the Rouge Valley. Water-based methods of transportation were often used to get agricultural and other products to market. The mouth of the Rouge River even had some of its own shipbuilding with at least four ships, sailing vessels, and steamers being constructed between the 1820s and 1880s.

As time progressed into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Rouge became a centre for leisure and recreation, a place for city-dwellers to escape into nature. Rosebank, for example, was a large-scale resort that began to develop in the 1870s, and quickly became an affordable and popular summer resort, offering camping, picnic grounds, and a dance hall. Morgan's Park was another area where city dwellers could escape the "roar of cities", having several cottages that eventually became year-round homes. Both Rosebank and Morgan's Park were located east of where Rouge Beach is today, on the other side of the Rouge River.

In the early 1920s, Cecil White, a local real estate broker, envisioned building a "Venice of the North" in the marsh area, calling it the Rouge Hills. He hired a team of Italian architects to design the project, which was to include roads, a network of canals, an artificial lake, and a bridge over the Rouge River. The project stalled once when the Great Depression hit in 1929 and again with the start of World War II in 1939. When Highway 401 reached the area in 1942, construction sped up again. Unfortunately, White passed away in 1946, before the project was completed. His wife Gladys continued work on the development, but when Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto in 1954, the project was largely destroyed and White's dream was abandoned. Today, one of the canals can still be seen on Google maps.

Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto in 1954, claiming 81 lives and damaging many parts of the city, including several areas within the park.

Hurricane Hazel struck Toronto on October 15, 1954, bringing winds of 110 km/h and 285 mm of rain in 48 hours. Eighty-one people died, roads and bridges were washed out, trains were derailed, and thousands of people were left homeless due to the destructive flooding that occurred in the city's river valleys. Damages were estimated at $100 million (well over $1 billion today).

Hurricane Hazel impacted many areas of the park. Cecil White's Venice of the North development at Rouge Beach was severely damaged by the storm, causing the project to be abandoned. Graham Park, a campground along the Rouge River, was also destroyed by the flooding. The land was later acquired by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and is now the site of Glen Rouge Campground. A bit further north, the flood waters washed away the swimming hole dam at the Rouge Valley Inn, near Twyn Rivers Drive.

Several bridges in the park were also washed out, including the bridge on Old Finch Avenue, near the Finch Meander area. To restore traffic flow through the area, a number of Bailey bridges were installed by the 2nd Field Engineer Regiment of the Canadian Military Engineers. The bridge on Old Finch Avenue is the last of these remaining in service in Toronto. Hurricane Hazel also damaged the campground and cottage area at Woodland Park and washed out the bridge at Reesor Road and Steeles Avenue.

Significant changes were made in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel. A 1956 report gave the Rouge, Duffins, Humber, and Petticoat (RDHP) Conservation Authority a mandate to acquire and manage properties for flood control purposes. Today, many of these lands are valuable conservation and recreation areas. In 1957, the RDHP Conservation Authority merged with the Humber Valley and Etobicoke-Mimico authorities to create the Metro Toronto Regional Conservation Authority (MTRCA). They developed a "Plan for Flood Control and Water Conservation", which led to the construction of dams, reservoirs, and stream channel improvements for flood mitigation.

The report also suggested that the Rouge offered great potential "for the development of a large-scale wilderness parkland and nature preserve", though no action was taken on this suggestion at the time. It would be several more decades before Rouge National Urban Park would be established.

Source - Parks Canada.

I've been watching "Walking with Dinosaurs" on BBC Earth.

There are lots of dinosaurs in Alberta. So, what about Ontario?

To give you a quick answer, our dinosaurs ended up being 'rock flour' ground up under advancing and retreating sheets of ice.

We do have the Devonian period with warm, shallow seas. Underwater millions of years ago.

Following is the information I could find about dinosaurs in Canada, especially Ontario. I've edited/ paraphrased but click the link to read the full article online.

GeoScienceInfo - Where are the dinosaurs?

...there is still a treasure trove of fossils just waiting to be uncovered here in Ontario. The fossils here are just much, much older than any dinosaur, because the time they lived in and thus the rocks that their remains eventually became fossilized within are much older. The rocks in southwestern Ontario range in age from the late Ordovician Period (about 455 million years) to the Late Devonian Period (about 360 million years). That is roughly 205-130 million years before the first dinosaur strutted on the scene.

The Mesozoic Era, sometimes colloquially called the Age of the Dinosaurs, lasted approximately 165 million years. Given that there would have been many billions of individual dinosaurs during that time, the remains of many little and big critters would have absolutely been buried in the sediments and later undergone fossilization across Ontario.

About 2.5 million years ago, global temperatures began to drop significantly, and ice sheets started to grow on the continents.

In North America, the Laurentide ice sheet covered most of Canada and some parts of the United States a number of times, as it advanced and retreated repeatedly in cycles of growth and shrinkage in response to climatic conditions. The ice sheet literally scraped many layers of rock away, turning whatever got in its way into a fine powder called “rock flour”. All those poor dinosaur fossils that waited so patiently to get their place of honour in a paleontology museum were instead ground up into dust.

Although glacial activity removed the fascinating rocks layers of the dinosaur-saturated Mesozoic Era here in Ontario, it ended up exposing the just-as-fascinating rock layers of the even older Paleozoic Era. The rocks that lie at or near the surface in southwestern Ontario range in age from the Upper (or late) Ordovician Period (about 455 million years old) around the Belleville to Peterborough area and get progressively younger as you drive southwest towards the Arkona area, where they are late Devonian in age (about 360 million years old). Although the fossils found in these rocks differ among species, there are many common types of fossils found in many of the limestone, dolostone, and shale outcrops throughout southwestern Ontario, from Ordovician to Devonian rock units.

Some of the most common types of fossils found in southwestern Ontario are corals. Although they look like plants, corals are actually marine animals that usually lived attached to the seafloor. The fossilized corals here in southwestern Ontario are either tabulate (colonial-type) or rugose (solitary and colonial type) corals. Other fossils are found in these rocks, such as brachiopods, gastropods, bivalves, crinoid parts, trilobites, bryozoans.

From Canadian National Geographic:

In 1991, a high school teacher discovered a giant T. rex skeleton while canvassing the badlands near Eastend, Saskatchewan. Nicknamed Scotty, this 13-metre-long, 8,800-kilogram beast is the largest T. rex ever discovered.

Morden, Manitoba holds the Guinness World Record for the largest publicly displayed mosasaur. Bruce, a 13-metre-long, 80-million-year-old marine reptile prowled the inland seas that covered what is now the Canadian prairies.

Canada’s oldest discovered dinosaurs are long-necked Triassic-era plateosaurs found in the Bay of Fundy.

The Age of Dinosaurs Gallery inside the Royal Ontario Museum, features Gordo, the largest real fossil skeleton in the country, and one of only three barosaurus on display in the world.

The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, Wembley, Alberta, sits adjacent to Pipestone Creek, one of the densest fossil beds anywhere in the world. It is final resting place for thousands of hadrosaur, tyrannosaur, nodosaur, plesiosaur, and pterosaur fossils.

Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Dinosaur Hall has one of the largest mounted displays of dinosaurs anywhere in the world, including triceratops and T. rex. Also the gorgosaurus and the herd-roaming Edmontosaurus.

On Vancouver Island, in 1988, local fossil enthusiast Mike Trask was exploring a local river when he discovered an 80-million-year-old elasmosaurus, the first of its kind in Canada. Now in The Courtenay Dinosaur Museum.

From Canadian Encylopedia - Dinosaurs Found in Canada

Canada is home to some of the richest deposits of dinosaur fossils in the world. The vast majority of the dinosaurs discovered in Canada are from Alberta, where the rising Rocky Mountains at the end of the Cretaceous period and a network of ancient rivers provided the sediment necessary for burying and preserving their remains.

While fossil birds have been found in Canada, they are not well understood because their fossils are very rare, not well preserved, and generally incomplete.

While dinosaur remains have been discovered in Nova Scotia, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Yukon, the fossils from these places are often not complete enough to identify to which species they belonged or have not yet been the subject of detailed scientific study. In the case of Nova Scotia, paleontologists have found fossils of a primitive armoured dinosaur, sometimes called Scutellosaurus, and of a long-necked, planting-eating dinosaur, informally called Fendusaurus eldoni.

Paleontologists can’t say exactly (and with certainty) what dinosaur species made footprints (called an ichnospecies) and eggs (called an oospecies). Many dinosaur footprints have been found in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

GeoScienceInfo - Paleo-environment of Southwestern Ontario

The rocks and fossils in the Arkona-Kettle Point area of southwestern Ontario were deposited roughly 387 to 372 million years ago, in the Middle to Late Devonian Period.

During the Middle to Late Devonian Period, most of what is now North America was part of a large continent called Laurussia.

The Arkona area was situated just south of the equator during the mid- to late Devonian Period at a similar latitude to modern day Brazil. It had a tropical climate, with little variation in temperature.

Much of east-central North America, including the Arkona area, was a shallow inland sea during this time. There was little mixing of water between the inland sea and the open ocean, being largely surrounded by land, bounded by the main (Laurussian) land mass to the north, the Trans-Continental Arch to the northwest, and the Acadian Mountains to the southeast.

The warm, tropical shallow sea that once occupied southwestern Ontario teemed with tropical marine life. Offshore conditions in these seas were typically calm, promoting the establishment of underwater “meadows” of crinoids. Although these creatures, commonly called “sea lilies”, superficially looked like plants, they were indeed animals that lived attached to the seafloor, filtering small food particles out of the water. Various species of shelled animals called brachiopods also lived in large numbers on the seafloor filtering food out of the water.

Above the seafloor, the water column would have also been a busy place. Squid-like cephalopods with chambered buoyant shells (e.g., nautiloids), and fish would have swum near the bottom, preying on smaller organisms.

Corals were both abundant and diverse in the warm, shallow sea. In some cases, forming reef-like buildups (as seen in the Amherstberg Formation) or more sheet-like bodies called biostromes (as represented in the coral unit of the Hungry Hollow Member of the Widder Formation).