Meet an Albertosaurus, a T-Rex ancestor.  He is pretty fierce looking both in his bare skeleton form and in the fleshed out recreation and he’s the star at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta.  This is a Smithsonian caliber museum of paleontology.  Ancient seas and glacial ages have left this area of Alberta just packed with dinosaur bones.  Large bonebeds and deposits over an extended period of time have provided lots of data to refine behavior models and theories about the evolution of dinosaur species.  The end result, a museum full of jaw dropping exhibits that tell wonderfully engaging stories.

Besides the museum: Drumheller is riddled with dinosaur stuff.  Brightly painted dinosaurs dot street corners, there is a dinosaur spray park, a bright purple Dino sits in the school yard, and the visitor center has an 85 ft tall steel T-Rex that you can even climb up in…I didn’t.

We rounded out our day with a piece of Saskatoon pie (fair but not stellar), a river crossing on a cable ferry, a walk across the Red Deer River on a bouncy suspension bridge, and bit of a hike in the Alberta badlands.  It was a hundred miles sort of out of the way and I did end up with boots full of mud (cursed bentonite) but it made for a great stop.