Royal Tyrell Museum

From the website: The Royal Tyrrell Museum celebrates the long history and spectacular diversity of life - from the tiniest grains of pollen to the mightiest dinosaurs.


Set in the Alberta badlands, the Museum opened in September, 1985. Four hundred thousand visitors were hoped for that first year. Nearly 600,000 came, and hundreds of thousands continue to visit each year.


They come to experience the power and excitement of some of the most remarkable fossil displays anywhere in the world, in Canada’s only institution devoted entirely to palaeontology.

I've only visited the museum once before. Robert was still in diapers at the time so that gives you an idea of how long ago it was. I really don't remember anything about it and we only have a handful of pictures. When we realized that the museum is (theoretically) only an hour from Tim and Candace's we made plans to go on Sunday, July 13th. Robert and Tim were working but Seth was off so we loaded up the little boys and headed out. I say it's "theoretically" an hour away because we hit construction which made the trip closer to 1.5 hours. Still not bad.

If you have any interest in dinoaurs whatsoever, or if you just enjoyed "Land Before Time" then the Royal Tyrell Museum is for you. It's world class museum full of everything you ever wanted to know about palentology.


Visiting with my cousins meant that I didn't get to absorb as much as I could have. I read most of the plaques but we didn't do the audio tour. Still, I really enjoyed it. Descriptions of the different exhibits are here My favourite was the impressive Dinosaur Hall, (If anyone can tell my why my stegosaurus is vertical instead of horizontal I'd appreciate it) and the information about the Burgess Shale.

After the museum we briefly explored the surrounding "badlands" we drove back in to the town of Drumheller called the "Dinosaur Capital of the World" and had lunch at the appropriately named "Dino's Family Restaurant". We briefly considered visiting this guy, the world's largest dinosaur but decided to just take a picture from the road.

From there we headed back to Tim & Candace's and spent the evening at home. We played a few rounds of LIFE, had nachos for dinner (since we had a late lunch), repacked our suitcases and visited until bedtime.