Royal Tyrell Museum

You may remember that I mentioned that we visited a dinosaur museum last week in the Canadian Badlands.

I'm slowly getting around to catching up with my travel posts so it's time for a look at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller - or the Dinosaur Museum as the girls like to call it.

The girls were both pretty excited about visiting the dinosaur museum. When asked what they were looking forward to seeing in Canada before our trip they'd respond in unison with "Dinosaurs!". This answer was usually met with looks of confusion from others until I'd explain that Alberta is a major dinosaur fossil site. Large numbers of dinosaur bones and fossils have been discovered in the Badlands area since geologist Joseph Burr Tyrell's (the museum's namesake) 1884 discovery of the skull of a large carnivorous dinosaur later named Albertosaurus.

The Royal Tyrell Museum is located just a few kilometres from the location of that first fossil discovery. The girls had been hopeful that they too would find their very own fossils while we were in the area. No new fossil finds for us but we did see a lot on display in the museum, along with plenty of other interesting exhibits. Here's a look...

Dinosaur models greet visitors in the Cretaceous Alberta room

Drumheller Dinosaurs

The town of Drumheller in Alberta, Canada certainly does love its dinosaurs!

Well, it is located smack-dab in the middle of a dinosaur and fossil rich area after all.

Driving through Drumheller when we first arrived we noticed colourful dinosaurs dotted around the town's street corners. The girls were pretty taken by these so we decided to go on a little dinosaur hunt and see how many we could find.

I wonder who he's waiting for

The Badlands

Time for another installment of our trip to Canada...

When you think of Canadian landscapes you tend to think of snowy mountains, lush pine forests, fertile green farmland etc. The image of badlands (harsh, dry environs unsuitable for farming) don't tend to spring to mind. Well, at least not when you think of the southern parts of Canada. But sure enough Canada has badlands and over the past few days we were visitors to such a place.

Now I must point out that what we saw of the Canadian Badlands was much less arid than most farmland we've seen back home in Australia. But I guess that by Canadian standards the land's not so good!

The Canadian Badlands are located east of Calgary. After driving for a few hours through some of the greenest farmland I've ever seen we arrived in the Badlands and the town of Drumheller. The change of scenery is quite sudden. The green and yellow of endless canola fields gives way rocky formations striped through the ages in shades of brown, red, white and black. The scenery is spectacular, quite like something that you'd expect to see in Utah - although on a much smaller scale, I'm sure.

Canadian Badlands

Welcome to Calgary

Greetings from Canada!

We're currently in Calgary on a visa renewal trip/holiday. Today we carried out the visa renewal part of our trip at the US consulate, and now we're onto the holiday part while we wait for our passports to be returned with their shiny new visas. Hooray for holidays!

We arrived in Calgary on Sunday. As we'd been up since 3am in preparation for our horribly early flight we decided that a fairly low key day was in order. After checking into our hotel in Downtown Calgary we headed to the banks of the Bow River for a walk. We crossed over the Peace Bridge (a modern, photo worthy pedestrian bridge), grabbed a bite to eat in the nearby area of Kensington then made our way back along the river and to our hotel. On our way back we spotted a few squirrels. Unlike the squirrels that we get back home in Berkeley, these Canadian squirrels were black.

Lola and Ava with the Peace Bridge