9/4 Royal Tyrrell Museum

This is a World Heritage museum located in Drumheller, Alberta, about 30 miles northeast of Calgary.  I've been to a couple of excellent dinosaur and fossil museums, and this is equal or better than any I have seen so far.  

First, a bit of explanation about the topography around this area.  The province of Saskatchewan and the eastern part of Alberta are plains--lots of flat or rolling land with a lot of wheat fields or land too dry to farm.  It is known for being boring to drive through, and looks a lot like this, for miles and miles and miles, broken up only by an occasional gas station and Tim Horton's restaurant!  

As you head farther west in Alberta, however, it starts to look even dryer, but with a lot of bluffs and badlands, which are basically mud formations. 

However, these muddy bluffs are excellent places to find dinosaur and other types of fossils, especially after the very occasional rains wash the mud away from the ancient bone beds. 

And in this area, you will find this excellent museum!

You can easily spend 3 hours or so here, which is about what I spent, but I will show you only a sampling of the photos I took.  

One thing that was interesting was how they tried to show you how animals were found.  This one was very unusual because it was so complete with all the bones in their original places.

Another exhibit was one of the real rooms where people were working to remove the excess rock and mud away from bones.  The big hoses pull airborne stuff away from workers so they don't inhale stone dust.

Sections of the museum were identified by these "clocks" showing where the next rooms were in terms of geologic time. 

You can tell we are getting close to the present time with this mammoth skeleton.

The next group shows these primitive sea animals.  Frankly, I am really glad they are extinct, as I would hate to swim with some of them. 

Finally, we entered a Cretaceous Garden.  This area contained real plants of the kinds during the days of the dinosaurs. 

It was at this point that I joined a handful of couples who were trying to find their way out.  The maps we had been given had a lot of dead ends, and the only exit signs were the emergency ones.  After some exploring, I found my way out through the gift shop, of course, and the others were not too far behind me!