Today we visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum located in the Drumheller Valley in the town of Drumheller. It’s located in the southern Alberta in a place called the Badlands. The museum was named after J.B. Tyrrell,  who in his search for coal deposits along the river, discovered a skull of a dinosaur. which is known today as the Albertasaurus. Tyrrell’s discovery marked the beginning of the collection of dinosaur remains. Drumheller itself was named after one it’s early settlers, Samuel Drumheller in 1913. Until the gas and oil boom of the 1980’s, Drumheller was one of the fastest growing places in Alberta. Today though it survives mainly on tourism and has a population of about 8,000. 

The museum is nestled in and area of steep, dry coulees ridged with the strata caused by hundreds of years of erosion. Even though the climate changes that are slowly changing the weather patterns here are effecting the coulees by providing enough moisture to allow plant life to grow where there once was none, they are still very beautiful, like an earth tone rainbow. It’s not really that large. There is a main building with exhibit areas, a cafeteria, an indoor garden and a learning center. The surrounding coulees can be climbed via stairs to an observation deck and there are trails in the area as well.

Katy is not quite as dinosaur crazy as my oldest nephew was at her age, but ever since her preschool teacher introduced her class to dinosaurs over a year ago, she has taken an interest that goes beyond the cursory. She even went to a dinosaur session of kindercamp this summer and still dresses like a pterodactyl from time to time when she isn’t dressed up as a princess or a ballerina. She can tell you how pterodactyls are birds really, and how some dinosaurs evolved into the birds we know today. It’s her favorite dinosaur though she likes T-Rex’s too. She had a pretty good time, I think. It’s hard to tell with young children in museums. The good thing about taking them with you is that is that it relieves you of the feeling that since you spent the money to come in, you should read everything at every exhibit. Having a child along allows you to just “look at the pictures” so to speak. We didn’t arrive there until late in the afternoon, so it wasn’t very crowded though that might have had more to do with the rain and the chilly temps than the time. We wandered for a couple of hours. Bought the obligatory  “I came, I saw, I got the t-shirt” for Katy and headed for home about six.

The drive was a long one and we didn’t get back until close to ten. Cranky, hungry child and slightly overtired husband, but all in all a really good day.