[1][2] He is one of the primary editors of the influential Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs,[3] and his areas of expertise include theropods (especially Tyrannosauridae), the origin of birds, and dinosaurian migration patterns and herding behavior.

[2] Currie became curator of earth science at the Provincial Museum of Alberta in Edmonton in 1976 just as he began the PhD program.

[1] In 1986, Currie became the co-director of the joint Canada-China Dinosaur Project, with Dale Russell of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and Dong Zhiming of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

[citation needed] Currie was involved in exposing a composite specimen that had been the subject of the 1999 National Geographic "Archeoraptor" scandal.

[14] Currie became increasingly sceptical of the orthodox belief that large carnivorous dinosaurs were solitary animals, but there was no evidence for his hypothesis that they may have hunted in packs.

However, circumstantial evidence came when he tracked down a site mentioned by Barnum Brown that featured 12 specimens of Albertosaurus from various age groups.

[19] He also reassessed the phylogenetic status of Nipponosaurus sachalinensis, discovering that it was much more basal among the Lambeosaurinae than palaeontologists had previously thought.

[22] In 2017, he and Ariana Paulina-Carabajal wrote a paper on the anatomy of the well-preserved braincase of Murusraptor barrosaensis, finding it to be more similar to tyrannosaurids than to allosaurids or ceratosaurids.

In 2011 and 2016, he was involved in the description of the first pterosaur fossils from the Northumberland Formation, a part of the Nanaimo Group, of Hornby Island in British Columbia, finding that they probably represented indeterminate members of Istiodactylidae and Azhdarchidae, respectively.

[37] Currie helped rediscover the type localities of the Mongolian sauropods Nemegtosaurus mongoliensis and Opisthocoelicaudia skarzynskii in 2017; the location of both quarries had become unknown due to them being described several decades before and not having been studied for some time.

[39] In 1981, Currie authored in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology a description of the ichnospecies Aquatilavipes swiboldae from the Aptian Gething Formation of British Columbia.

[49] In 2013, he worked with David Christopher Evans and Derek W. Larson to study and name the velociraptorine dromaeosaurid Acheroraptor temertyorum,[50] and with Dong Zhiming and other palaeontologists to describe Nebulasaurus taito.

[54] In 2017, Currie helped describe Aepyornithomimus tugrikinensis, the first species of ornithomimosaur found in the Djadokhta Formation of Mongolia,[55] Halszkaraptor escuilliei, a halszkaraptorine dromaeosaurid,[56] and Latenivenatrix mcmasterae, the largest known troodontid.

[37] In 2020, Currie, together with longtime collaborator Rodolfo Coria, was part of a team of researchers that published a description of Lajasvenator ascheriae, the oldest known carcharodontosaurid from the Cretaceous period.