A Change... of Course

Our trip to the Dinosaur Provincial Park got us thinking about a change in our original route to Calgary. Not far to the north from our Brooks, Alberta campground is the Royal Tyrrell Museum, about an hour and a half away.

So on Friday, June 14th we checked out of Tillebrook Provincial Park and drove 88 miles to the Hoodoo RV Resort and Campground in Rosedale, Alberta close to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. Our campsite was in the unserviced area and allowed us to park with our RV doors facing each other's rigs. On that Friday afternoon we drove into Drumheller to get some supplies. I stopped by the Canadian Tire Company store and got a great quote on some tires for the truck. We've been thinking it is about time to replace our Cooper tires with 45,000 mile on them before driving into Alaska. The tire price on sale was less than I paid two years ago so we made an appointment for noon on Saturday to bring the truck back for the installation.

We returned to the campground and I got busy cleaning the front of the fifth wheel. It was covered with dead bugs from the trip north and I wanted to try this new cleaner with wax I purchased. We enjoyed a "happy hour" before our gourmet dinner provided by Sean and Kathy. Sean built this contraption that turns the campfire ring into a pizza oven! They made two delicous pepperoni, sausage, ham and cheese pizzas over the campfire. Later, after dinner we sat around the fire and made s'mores with Reese's peanut butter cups.

Late Saturday morning we both drove into town. Karen and I dropped off the truck and we got into Sean and Kathy's truck and headed for the museum outside of Drumheller. The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (RTMP) is a palaeontology museum and research facility in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. The museum was named in honour of Joseph Burr Tyrrell, a Canadian geologist, cartographer, mining consultant and historian. He discovered dinosaur (Albertosaurus sarcophagus) bones in Alberta's Badlands and coal around Drumheller in 1884.

During the late 1970s, the government of Alberta began to consider building within, or adjacent to, Dinosaur Provincial Park. In 1981, the provincial government formally announced plans to build a palaeontology museum. However, the museum was built in Midland Provincial Park near Drumheller, as opposed to Dinosaur Provincial Park.

The museum's personal collection includes over 160,000 cataloged fossils, consisting of over 350 holotypes, providing the museum with the largest collection of fossils in Canada. The museum displays approximately 800 fossils from its collection in its museum exhibits. In addition to exhibits, the museum's fossil collection is also used by the museum's research program, which carries a mandate to document and analyze geological and palaeontological history.

The museum was extensive and the exhibits simply amazing. Many of the reconstructed creatures were made from fossil castings of the original animals, but some exhibits were of the original fossil remains recovered. Some of the museum exhibits were from the very Dinosaur Provincial Park we visited days earlier. The building was not only designed to function as a museum, but as a laboratory/research facility. The original structure was completed in 1985 and has been expanded twice. According to Wikipedia, the museum building now encompasses 135,000 square feet.

This is a fascinating museum to visit and we were all glad we made the decision to modify our plans to see this wonderful natural history site.