By Cherie Thiessen
If you think you might enjoy being digested and spit out of the mouth of an 86’ tall Tyrannosaurus rex, Drumheller in Canada’s southern Alberta is probably your best bet.
There’s nowhere you can get closer to the prehistoric beasts, but if being inside Rex is a little closer than you would prefer, be reassured by the fact that this Tyrannosaurus knows his place; it wouldn’t dream of closing its jaws on you. At eight years old, he’s the largest dinosaur on the planet. In fact, you can see him peering over the skyline from almost every point in town. Hardy visitors enjoy climbing the 106 steps inside the belly of the beast, claiming that the surrounding views are spectacular from its mouth. I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid of heights – happily not of dinosaurs, though.
Determined to explore the Royal Tyrrell Museum, just a few miles out of Drumheller, we drove out from the west coast on a perfect Indian summer week, when the leaves had become gilded and tourists had thinned.
Since opening in 1985, this incredible museum in the middle of the Badlands hosts over 375,000 visitors annually, with 86% from Canada but startlingly only 5% from its neighbor, the United States. (In 2008, that translates into 7000 American visitors.) Given the importance of this museum and the stark beauty of the surrounding area, it’s a surprise. The only museum in Canada devoted totally to paleontology, it preserves 120,000 individual specimens, including the best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skull in the world, and the skeleton of a young Theropod, (fierce lizard) also the best example of its kind in the world. In addition, a new exhibit, a 69-foot Shonisaurus, (giant marine reptile) excavated from British Columbia’s remote north by the museum’s past curator of Marine Reptiles, Dr. Elizabeth Nicholls, has been painstakingly reassembled. Not surprisingly it has become another international show-stopper.
Wandering through these galleries can take hours, even though the building in itself is not huge. Visitors get to watch the archaeologists at work, to see presentations in the media room, to go for a nearby guided hike in the Badlands, to enter the Cretaceous Garden with its 300 species of prehistoric plants, or to experience the world of underwater creatures in Burgess Shale.
