The most important place for us to visit in Drumheller, was of course, The Royal Tyrell Museum! Not JUST because it's supposed to be so amazing, but because Sam has a special fossil he wanted to have assessed.
Our first full day in Drumheller was spent at the museum. We signed up for the 'Experience Alberta's History' pass which gets us in to the museum - and several other museums free for a year! This is WELL worth getting for us!! We are always at the Royal Alberta Museum, and on our trip we were already planning to visit Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, so I knew it would save us a lot of money!
The first thing we did was ask the girl at customer service if there was someone who could assess Sams fossil! Turns out she is actually trained in that kind of thing anyway - she said she would help if possible and if not she would find someone who could!
She explained to Sam that the fossil was of sea snail shells - and that they got trapped in the rock when Alberta was covered in a shallow sea. She showed us a faux fossil on the outside of the rock and then showed us where many snail shells had been totally crushed, but then one had survived the impact whole and created the shell fossil.
She then explained that as the fossil was not found in the area, Sam could take 'legal ownership' of it - but she did say that by law any fossils found in Alberta are not allowed to leave the Province. If he ahd found the fossil in the Drumheller area, he would have had to surrender it - although if it is on privately owned land it would belong to the land owner.
He was given a leaflet explaining it all :)
She was so great and so helpful :) We also found displays of fossils just like Sams and they were dated 75 million years ago....wow!!
The museum is amazing - Beautiful displays and its so hard to believe that they are REAL bones and REAL dinosaurs - they all look like plastic replicas, but the museum displays are 70% real. Some have parts that are cast to make up the full skeleton or to allow people to touch them...
One guide showed us samples of various bones, teeth and even petrified POOP!!! :)
The museum itself is surrounded by endless hiking trails into Dinosaur Provincial Park:
Comparing heights with a dinosaur leg:
We weighed ourselves all together, and we weighed the same as a bear!!
Yes these are all real:
Couldn't resist taking a picture of petrified poop:
