Alberta, Canada: The Royal Tyrrell Museum is the king of dinosaur museums

http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/
Distances and Times by Car
Calgary 138 km (85mi) 1 hr 30 min
Edmonton 280 km (174 mi) 3 hrs
Drumheller 6 km (4 mi) 7 min
Red Deer 169 km (105 mi) 2 hrs
Banff 264 km (163 mi) 3 hrs
Brooks 138 km (85 mi) 1 hr 30 min
Lethbridge 302 km (188 mi) 3 hrs 15 min
Medicine Hat 251 km (156 mi) 2 hrs 30 min

From Off the Map blog by Mark Stachiew, hosted at the communities.canada.com website: The Royal Tyrrell Museum is the king of dinosaur museums
World class museums are usually found in a nation's capital or large metropolises, but don’t tell that to the folks at The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Despite it’s modest surroundings, it is considered by many to be the world’s finest museum dedicated to paleontology, the science of studying prehistoric life.

After our outdoor tour of the Badlands the previous day with all its talk of geology and dinosaur bones, we were ready to explore the museum to see what scientists have dug up and discovered in the Alberta soil.

Even before setting a foot in the door, the museum is a treat for the eyes. The building is an attractive, low structure set out in the valley so that it blends in nicely with the shapes and colour of the Badlands scenery. It's named for Joseph Tyrrell, a surveyor who came to this area to look for coal, found it, but also found dinosaur bones.

After getting your tickets, you walk through a winding display of massive dinosaur skeletons, all of which were unearthed in Alberta. In fact, 70% of the museum’s collection comes from the province, much of it from nearby Dinosaur Provincial Park.

What’s interesting about the displays in this part of the museum is that rather than just regurgitate dry facts about the animals, there are anecdotes about each individual from the paleontologists who collected them. As they will tell you, every fossil has a story.

As you make your way through the galleries, there are a variety of dinosaurs, some complete, some just fragments, of all shapes and sizes which are grouped by themes. One was called Lords of the Land which highlighted the giant carnivores, including a cast reproduction of the world's most famous and largest Tyrannosaurus Rex, Sue, which is housed in Chicago’s Field Museum. The Royal Tyrrell has its own spectacular T. Rex known as Black Beauty, but it doesn’t have the same name recognition. The Lords of the Land exhibition had the dinosaurs displayed in gilded frames with elements of polished brass and piped in classical music, making it all seem very high-brow.

There were other themes to discover, such as female paleontologists who have worked for the museum, which the scientists who work there will be quick to tell you is a research centre that just happens to have a public museum attached.

One area of the Tyrrell that was unique was its botanical garden. This is no ordinary garden. It is a Cretaceous garden, featuring nothing but species that flourished in Alberta during that time, many of which are considered tropical species today.

The bulk of the rest of the museum is arranged by geologic era with collections of fossils grouped by age with the oldest first, running through the different dinosaur ages then culminating in the Ice Age and rise of mammals.

Visitors to the Tyrrell can easily spend two to four hours there, or longer, depending on how much information they can absorb or how obsessed they are about dinosaurs. If you are a family with children, how long you will stay will depend on their ages and attention spans. There are certainly plenty of activities and displays that are aimed at kids and what child isn’t fascinated by dinosaurs?

One of the displays at the museum is a window that overlooks the preparation room where scientists work with chisels, drills, picks and a variety of specialized tools extracting fossils from the rock. Some of these men and women will work for months, and even years, on the same fossil. It’s truly a job for someone with a lot of patience.

As you observe the room, check out the crane with the 3-ton capacity that hauls the rocks into the room and the massive garage doors that are needed to move in some of the heftier specimens.

During my visit, I had the privilege of accessing an area that is off-limit to visitors, but demonstrates the size of the museum’s collection. It is the area that houses the items not on display to the public. One room that looks likes the warehouse scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, contains recently collected fossils still encased in plaster or sitting in crates sent from the field. The other area is a huge, morgue-like room that houses the prepared fossils waiting their turn to one day be publicly displayed. The Tyrrell has about 125,000 fossils, of which a mere 1% are ever on display.

Once your done touring the many exhibits, the museum also features outdoor activities such as the dinosite hike which we experienced. It’s a 3-km walk out into the surrounding countryside where you get to look for fossils and see an actual dinosaur in situ as it would look prior to excavation. Don't even think of keeping anything you find. It's illegal to take fossils out of the park or outside of Alberta's borders. Fines can can run into the thousands and even end up in jail time.

The Royal Tyrrell truly deserves its regal designation and until I see another dinosaur museum of its calibre, I’ll agree with the folks who call it the world’s finest paleontological museum.