Royal Tyrell & Dinosaur Provincial Park
We bid a reluctant farewell to the Rockies and began the return leg of our journey in earnest. We passed through the suburbs of Calgary and headed to the town of Drumheller to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum. It turns out that Alberta, Canada is one of the best places in the world to find dinosaur fossils and the Royal Tyrell is one of the best places to learn more about them. Ben had been looking forward to this day since the beginning of the trip.
The museum had some excellent exhibits with great, succinct storytelling. Still, I think we would have been even more into the experience if our museum visit had followed what came next – our two nights in Dinosaur Provincial Park. But, here are two noteworthy exhibits that stood out to me:
The first was about how regular people stumbled across these incredible fossil discoveries at their home or workplace. The description would say something like, “Bob was digging a new foundation for his garage when he found these fish fossils that are 66 million years old and crazy rare!” Or, “Jim was manning a fracking drill bit when he saw something strange. Having visited the museum the week before, he thought to give us a call. The discovery turned out to be an enormous mummified ancient sea creature, the likes of which had never been seen before!”
I also thought they did a great job with the ‘check out how this fish grew legs’ period of evolutionary time. They had these models of a creature that looks fake, like a Muppet. And, I would say to Ray, there’s no way that animal existed in real life.” And, then I’d look up and see the bones, and think, “Huh. It sure did exist.” (It should be noted that I was more wowed by this than Ray).
After a few hours at the museum, we continued two hours further east to Dinosaur Provincial Park which is where many of the dinosaur fossils on display at Royal Tyrell were found. This campsite was a great surprise. The location is right in the Canadian Badlands, which are as interesting as South Dakota’s and much less traversed. And, as an added bonus…the terrain is full of dinosaur bones! Camping here gave us a full day to explore the park.
We did two short hikes and climbed around on the hoodoo-like structures in the park.
But, the highlight of our stay was doing two programs hosted by the Alberta parks department. First, we did a program called “cast from the past” where we all got to make our own plaster cast of a fossil found at the park.
While they were drying, our excellent guide explained the purpose of making casts and models of the bones rather than using the real fossils which are fragile and easily broken. We also got to hold a real femur bone of a Hadrosaur, the duck-billed dino, and we got to hang around in a real paleontology field lab, which was super cool.
Later that afternoon, we hopped on a bus to a part of the preserve only accessible with a guide. She drove us past some really interesting structures and explained more about the unique geography of the park. She also took us to a spot where a Ranger discovered a dinosaur on the side of a cliff in the mid 1950’s, which they cautiously slid down the hillside and left in place for all to observe. They did build a structure around it for protection.
Eli and the kids wrapped up the stay by climbing on to the hills right behind camp and striking a pose or two.
I think we all felt it was a worthwhile visit and one that we wouldn’t necessarily have taken if we hadn’t been traveling with the camper.
Honorable Mention: There were a lot of mosquitos at Dinosaur Provincial Park. Like a lot a lot. But, fortunately, Eli came prepared. Here’s a selfie taken on a dog walk.
