The Dinosaurs Are Coming! The Dinosaurs Are Coming!

On Sunday morning, August 12th, we packed up and headed out of Banff on our way to Calgary. Our first destination was the Symons Valley RV Park, a dismal and pitiful campground packed with decrepit RVs. Yikes. Well, the price fits. In any case, we set up camp and then ate a nice lunch in the coach.

We drove into Calgary looking for the visitor center and, despite our best efforts, we could not find one open. Unlike much smaller towns that strive to impress the visitors they do receive, Calgary and other large cities seem to hide their visitor centers or not offer them open on Sundays. Whatever the case, we investigated an alternative slice of the local scene we knew would be both available in a large city and open on Sundays: Goodwill. The first Goodwill we found had a treasure trove of fine yarn that I couldn't live without. Excellent. Ken obligingly helped carry the load while we scoured the store for more deals. We left with many of them.

The second Goodwill store offered no yarn, but some nice books and DVDs we couldn't live without. Nice. Just around the corner, we stopped at the Limerick's Traditional Public House for happy hour, dinner and the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. We each ordered a pint of beer and ate our delicious happy hour appetizers (BOGO fish tacos!) on the restaurant's patio in the warm sunshine.

Hail accumulated on the windshield of the car

After dinner, we stopped at a Starbucks for a late afternoon decaf coffee before heading back to the RV. And then the fun began. What started as a darkening of the clouds and a menacing bit of lightening off in the distance soon became a full-fledged thunderstorm. The hail started first, perhaps only pea-sized, with some rain thrown in for good measure. Within minutes, pea-sized became plump summer grape-sized. We watched helplessly as the hail pummelled the car while simultaneously plugging our ears as it beat down on the roof of the RV. It felt like sitting inside the drum of a heavy metal band. Wow. The hail lasted about 20 minutes, longer than any hail storm either of us has experienced. After it mercifully ended, we returned to our movie which we could now hear again. We fell asleep wondering what damage it had done.

Jurassic toe jam

On Monday morning, a quick inventory was taken of the hail toll: not much, thankfully. The car sustained only a few small dings, surprisingly, and the RV suffered a broken vent cover, but it was old anyway, and a few chips in some weather stripping (also old) along the roofline. Not bad considering how loud and how big the hail was. Nice.

A tux jacket? And bow tie?
A bit formal for mid-August...

What do I even do with this?

The morning's pretty blue sky erased all memories of the storm and we headed out toward Drumheller, about an hour east of Calgary. Drumheller, the self-described 'Dinosaur Capital of the World', is a town that has capitalized on all things dinosaur. Like Roswell, New Mexico's kitchy UFO bent, Drumheller's rainbow assortment of odd dinosaurs are found in front of businesses, on lampposts, on walls and peeking out above fences. The world's largest (fake) dinosaur can be found standing over the visitor center. And, like Roswell, one can find how the town's fascination with the prehistoric animals extends to business names, such as the Jurassic Indoor Spa or Fred and Barney's Family Restaurant. The kitsch is town-wide.

Cool Shops, Yummy Food,
& Oddly Painted Dinosaurs

We started at the visitor center where the helpful clerk told us about the Royal Tyrrell Museum nearby as well as about the various dinosaur-related activities available all throughout the Red Deer River area. But, first, lunch. We chose Gus's Corner Restaurant, an Italian-ish place offering nice calzones with service at a glacial pace. Good thing we weren't in a hurry. Not only did they not have ricotta in the restaurant at all (a calzone without ricotta is a stromboli), they served the calzones with French fries not marinara sauce. Odd, but very tasty.

Largest Dinosaur in the World

Waiting for the bus
with my buddy

After lunch, we took pictures with the dinosaur holding flowers and waiting for the bus as well as with the stegosaurus next to the drugstore. The concrete dinosaurs in a multitude of bright colors were too numerous for us to count, but we made sure to get a picture of the one in a tux jacket with a silly half-smile/half-growl on his face. Ha!

An ammonite whose color comes from the
fossilization of the mollusk's shell over time

We drove on to the Royal Tyrrell Museum, an outstanding collection of dinosaur bones presented in an informational and interesting manner. The museum is named for Joseph Burr Tyrrell, a 26-year old geologist who found Canada's first skull of a meat-eating dinosaur while surveying in the Drumheller area in 1884. In fact the entire area of south central Alberta is a veritable gold mine of dinosaur fossils. This led to an influx of fossil hunters in the Canadian Badlands shortly after his discovery.

Predecessor to the
later Triceratops

Founded in 1985, the museum is also a research facility dedicated to the study of paleontology whose contributions to the science and the world have been so significant that the museum was honored with the title 'Royal' by Queen Elizabeth in 1990. With entirely too much information to be absorbed in one afternoon, we read almost all of the plaques and stories about each of the animals and plants displayed in the exhaustively extensive museum. After the standard 2 hour time limit imposed by most human brains, ours turned off, too. In spite of that, at least we retained a small fraction of the endless stream of information provided in this awesome facility.

Devonian Reef

During the Devonian Period (416-359 million years ago), fish proliferated. This point in our prehistory is defined by giant marine reefs and millions of microscopic marine animals. As we strolled through the exhibit of the Devonian Reef, we could see countless underwater animals and plants in the display. Alberta, and truly, much of the western half of the North American continent, was underwater where these reefs teemed with ancient marine life.

T. Rex 'Black Beauty' from the late Cretaceous Period

Stegosaurus

Another exhibit displayed the plants and animals of the Paleozoic Era (542-251 million years ago), during a time when they moved from the seas to dry land. The effects of gravity and the absence of water resulted in a significant amount of evolution. About 300 million years ago, as the plants and animals gained a strong foothold on land, diverse ecosystems developed around the planet. Then, at a point that marks the boundary between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Eras, a mass extinction, likely caused by a huge meteorite, wiped out 90% of life on Earth about 251 million years ago (the end of the Permian Period).

Dimetrodons

The Dimetrodon was a mammal-like reptile who lived during the Permian Period. The sharp teeth and large skull indicate it was at the top of the food chain, and the sail along its back may have been an evolutionary attempt at regulating body temperature, allowing it to be active earlier in the day than other animals. This fearsome character was one of a group of reptiles that eventually gave rise to mammals.

Triassic ichthyosaur predating the ALCAN Highway
by about 220 million years

Discovered in the early 1990s along the bank of the Sikanni Chief River in northeastern British Columbia, scientists found the world's largest marine reptile, the Shonisaurus sikanniensis. At almost 69 feet long, this ichthyosaur of the Triassic Period (220 million years ago) is 30% larger than its nearest relative. Lacking teeth, it is also, curiously, a precursor to modern whales and the earliest-known example of a giant filter-feeding vertebrate. Fascinating!

Chasmosaurus belli giving us
the evil eye

In the museum's dinosaur hall, we saw dozens of reconstructed dinosaurs, frozen in place chasing each other, sunning themselves or curled in a death pose imbedded in rock. The large and imposing Chasmosaurus belli, first identified in 1904, looked ready to pounce on unsuspecting tourists at any moment. He stared at us menacingly as we walked past. We tried not to linger.

Elasmosaur from the broken neck end

Upstairs we saw an impressive exhibit of a 75 million year old sea dragon. Found in 2007 by a heavy equipment operator in an Ammolite mine, paleontologists determined it was a new species of plesiosaur, an elasmosaur. The 46 foot long elasmosaur's neck was found in 4 long pieces and sported 76 neck vertabrae, 10 times more than a giraffe's neck. Curiously, scientists also discovered several kilograms of round stones in the beast's belly, from the size of a golf ball to that of a softball. To date, the reason for the gastroliths (stomach stones) is unknown, though theories range from ballast for stability in the water to an aid for digestion. Interesting.

Albertosaurus sarcophagus

The dinosaur whose skull was found by Mr. Tyrrell in 1884 would eventually be named Albertosaurus sarcophagus ('flesh-eating lizard from Alberta') in 1905, the same year Alberta became a province of Canada. Dominant in the Cretaceous period (over 69 million years ago), the Albertosaurus was a top predator of its time, the most common large carnivore found in Alberta and a predecessor of Tyrannosaurus rex. A nearby bonebed, or mass grave, was discovered where at least 22 Albertosaurus sarcophagus skeletons were found.

Star Mine Suspension Bridge

The Royal Tyrrell Museum was one of the best museums we've ever had the pleasure of visiting. The quality and volume of the exhibits are unparalleled in our limited dinosaur museum experiences. We will surely visit again sometime.

Hoodoos of Drumheller

Along the South Dinosaur Trail, we found the Star Mine Suspension Bridge, originally built in 1931. The swaying 384 foot suspension bridge was used by miners to reach the work site until the mine's closure in 1957. Since then, the Alberta government has maintained the bridge for tourists and to commemorate the Drumheller Valley's colorful mining history. We walked across the bridge in, thankfully, light wind, though the footsteps of other visitors made for a bouncy path.

Badlands of Alberta

We moved on to the hoodoos of the Willow Creek Coulee. These natural columns have weathered in place over thousands of years and, like the ones in Bryce Canyon, Utah, have flat tops where a harder rock slows the process of erosion of the soft sandstone beneath them. We walked through the hoodoos and admired the colorful patterns of the badlands in which these rock formations are found. Much like the badlands found in the U.S., the stripes of various ancient sea sediments color the now treeless expanse of this area of Alberta.

The Drumheller Hoodoos

We wandered back to the car and returned to the RV in Calgary. Anxious to see the lower 48 again for the first time in 2 solid months, we readied the coach to leave in the morning and turned into pumpkins.