CANADA HISTORY - Places-Archeological

Drumheller

In 1884 a geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell was searching through the Red Deer Valley when he discovered the fossilized remains of a dinosaur. As it turned out, that area, the badlands, and others in Alberta, contained some of the most extensive fossil beds in the world.

By 1985 the Tyrrell Museum was opened on the spot where he had made the original discovery and during a visit in 1990, Queen Elizabeth II gave the museum the Royal designation.

Located in the centre of a formation known as the Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon Formation which has produced some of the finest specimens in the world. The museum covers over 3.9 billion years of the history of life on earth and exhibits several specimens of fossil finds such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and one named after the province, Albertosaurus. Other highlight exhibits are the Burgess Shale's which displays life in the sea when the land was underwater, the Devonian reef which portrays a 375 million year old reef and the Age of Mammals which depicts the life of mammals during the Cenozoic period.

Overall, this is probably the best museum in the world covering such a large period of palentonic history with almost all samples form the area.