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Drumheller - Tyrrell Museum |
Head Smashed
Inn Buffalo Jump |
Ksan Historic
Village | Inuit
Heritage Centre
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.
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