The Royal Tyrrell Museum

The badlands around Drumheller erode so fast that fossils keep appearing, and the Royal Tyrrell was built in the middle of them to hold what comes out. Its collection runs to tens of thousands of specimens with dozens of mounted skeletons, and its strength is that so much of it is local: Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus and the horned dinosaurs of the Cretaceous plains. The single most extraordinary object is the nodosaur found in 2011 in an oil sands mine, preserved so completely, with skin and armour in place and its outline intact, that it reads as a sculpture rather than a fossil. Working laboratories are visible through glass. Outside, the badlands themselves can be walked, and the hoodoos and Horseshoe Canyon are close by.

History

Alberta announced plans for a palaeontology museum in 1981, building it in Midland Provincial Park near Drumheller rather than in Dinosaur Provincial Park, and its first director, David Baird, named it after Joseph Burr Tyrrell, the geologist who found the first reported dinosaur fossil in the Red Deer River valley in 1884 while looking for coal. The Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology opened on 25 September 1985, joined the China-Canada Dinosaur Project the same year, became the Royal Tyrrell Museum on 28 June 1990, and was enlarged in 2003 and again later (Wikipedia, Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology).

Highlights

• The nodosaur - the astonishingly preserved armoured dinosaur from the oil sands.
• The Cretaceous gallery - Albertosaurus and the horned dinosaurs of the local plains.
• The working labs - preparators visible through glass at their benches.
• The badlands outside - Horseshoe Canyon and the hoodoos nearby.

When to go

May to September is the busiest with full hours and guided badlands programmes; the museum is open year-round with reduced winter hours. Summer weekends and school holidays are crowded, so go early. The badlands outside are baking in midsummer and best walked early or late.

What to expect

It is popular enough that summer weekends are shoulder to shoulder in the main halls. Drumheller itself is a small town with limited dining and a run of roadside dinosaur statuary that is pure kitsch. It is ninety minutes from Calgary, and combining it with Dinosaur Provincial Park two hours away makes a long but excellent day.

Nearby

Horseshoe Canyon and the hoodoos are minutes away; Dinosaur Provincial Park is two hours southeast.

Key facts