Oh Canada. So far away from Apache Junction but now that we were in Montana, suddenly so close. For several years I have been plotting how to get to Drumheller, Alberta, and now was the time. Southern Alberta looks – surprise!—a lot like northern Montana. Slightly undulating prairie, not many people. However, this part of Alberta is in Canada’s south, her breadbasket, the closest thing to a suitable place to grow crops in the country. And grow crops they do, a lot of different ones. The great American agricultural states tend to specialize: Kansas has vast cornfields, Nebraska does corn along with soybeans, Montana does wheat, etc.

Along the highway from the Montana border to our first night’s stop in Dinosaur Provincial Park (a hint as to why I wanted to come to this part of the world) we identified flax, canola, potatoes, peas, sugar beets, corn, onions, alfalfa and several different cereal grains which I am not equipped to identify. You’ve never seen canola in bloom, you say? Here’s a photo of canola fields on both sides of the highway. Flax fields, of which I was unable to get a satisfactory photo at 60 mph, are the most incredible blue, like Cinderella’s gown, and when planted next to canola are even more spectacular. Somewhere in the section about our last trip to France there is a photo of a flax field if you’re really interested.




Dinosaur Provincial Park encompasses a large area of badlands through which the Red Deer River runs. Think South Dakota badlands but with a river and cottonwood trees. These badlands just happen to have sedimentary strata which were laid down at the time of the dinosaurs. Paleontologists really like it when Mother Nature does most of the work and erodes the strata down to where the fossils exist, kind of like what happens on the faces of these badlands bluffs.





This photo shows a structure built over a partially excavated dinosaur skeleton, to show what the paleontologists see on the discovery site.





Much of the park is closed to the public for obvious reasons, but you can take a bus tour which goes through some of the closed areas. On our way out to take the self-driving tour early in the morning, this doe and fawn decided that they needed to be elsewhere when I stopped to take a photo of the fawn nursing.




As it turns out, there are a number of different dinosaur fossil sites in Alberta and these canny Canucks have turned the ever-popular beasts into several minor tourist attractions along with one major, world-class museum, the Royal Tyrrell Museum at Drumheller, my long-sought dinosaur destination. Dinosaur Provincial Park gives you a good feeling for where dinosaurs are found. The Museum gives you the dinosaurs. It has one of the largest collections of dinosaur fossils in the world! Who wouldn’t want to see it? I have to say that my loving husband wasn’t entirely sure himself and was humoring me when he agreed to visit the Museum. In the course of the several hours we spent there, he became a convert. We should have planned two or three days, or I should say, two or three days in the off-season, because this is a very popular spot, especially for people with children, bless their little hearts. Anyway, here is a sample of the displays we saw. Most of them I cannot name, and you dear reader probably wouldn’t recognize the name anyway unless you are a real dino nerd.

This turtle-like creature was so-o-o cute.


I think these are theropods gamboling.


Here's a T Rex.








Hello Mr. Rex!



This is another cutie. Is he saying "Feed me?" Who could resist?

























This photo doesn't due Black Beauty sufficient justice. A remarkably complete T Rex found in Alberta and also one of the smallest T Rex examples ever found. Beautifully displayed.



















This is an ammonite, which is a fairly common fossil. Under certain conditions of fossilization, one may be turned into a lovely gem-like substance. In fact, these are mined as gems and jewelry is made from them.



















Something that is hard to grasp is that most of these displays are the real deal—these are the fossilized bones. In the few cases where an incomplete skeleton must be displayed for some reason, the parts of the bones that were missing and substituted are in a contrasting color so it is obvious where the real ends and the replica begins. Similarly, in a couple of cases, a whole skeleton was cast from an original to make a striking display, and this too is also clearly pointed out. In one gallery, you can watch technicians prepare the fossils, carefully picking away the rock from the bone. Talk about a job requiring patience! Progress is probably measured in millimeters. Not something you want to rush.

Scattered throughout the galleries are stations where museum personnel are set up to demonstrate something. We enjoyed a nice long chat with a technician who was demonstrating up close the removal of rock from bone and how different acids are used to assist in the work as well as what tools are used. Let me also say that the museum has done a world class job in creating the displays and also the interpretive material.

In addition to the ever-popular dinosaur bones, the Tyrrell gives a large chunk of display space to fossils found in the Burgess Shale, which is on the British Columbia side of the Canadian Rockies, fossils from a much earlier era and which represent a fascinating multitude of sea life, pretty much all of which is extinct today.

There is a large gallery of later sea creatures, like plesiosaurus and a wonderful enormous crocodilian with a head about nine feet long. Yikes—who would ever go in the water if he was still around? These exhibits were dimly lit, with the skeletons mounted as if they were swimming and the viewer was also under the water, so I didn’t get any good images but let me say that they too were spectacular.

There is another gallery with little teeny fossils of plants and animals from an era which escapes me at the moment and these are gorgeous too, and people were spending time examining them just as much as they did the dinosaurs.

By the time we were two-thirds through the museum we were both beginning to wilt under the serious overload and I’ll admit that we staggered rapidly through the more recent eras. Fortunately we had already seen mammoths so we didn’t even pause in front of the beautifully posed complete skeleton. I’m sure we must have missed some things but our brains had absorbed all they could. And now Al understood why I had been trying to drag him to Drumheller for years and years.