Today we stepped back in time a few million years by visiting the
Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. This is the main attraction
that brings people to Drumheller and it is well worth a visit.
Located a few kilometres out of town on the North Dinosaur trail it
is a modern building set in the middle of a small valley. It seemed
slightly at odds with its surroundings and I could picture it being
used as a set for a Bond film where the baddies had their scientific
research centre for some evil, dastardly scheme.
The
museum was captivating and in total we spent about four hours there.
Not getting there until late morning we actually found we ran out of
time and whilst I matched my pace around the exhibits to the time
left available, Stef continued to look at exhibits in detail which
means he did not see everything there was there. I would probably go
back again. They had the museum really well balanced between
information panels that you could read, little experiments you could
do, buttons you could push and videos to watch. The videos were
superb and all features the same man, John Acorn, who I think is
something to do with the museum rather than just an actor. He did
not take himself too seriously and had a great way of getting across
his message. I found them really entertaining and could picture a
group of kids chuckling away watching him and learning as they went.
After a brief look at the world and how its rotation around the sun
influences the seasons we headed for a room sponsored by Shell. It
was totally designed for little kids but with none in there we went
and had a look. They had a couple of bit plants with holes and air
tubes in them and loads of soft balls on the floor. The air tubes
sucked the balls up into the flowers and then spewed them out across
the room. It kept us entertained for a good ten minutes!
At the Nexen section there were different demonstrations of
physical properties, all linked back to how they influence geology.
These looked at how liquids with different levels of viscosity
behave, the impact of water flow speed on the ground, refraction of
light and your own speed of reactions to name a few. From here they
took you through a hall explaining about the people how have made
this area famous with their findings of dinosaur and other
fossilised remains.
There is a clear historical demarcation of when dinosaurs were
alive and when they became extinct. This is represented geologically
by the layers of earth in which remains have been found. The dark
rich soil that is a dinosaur hunters dream is covered by a layer a
few centimetres deep separating it from lighter soil above. The key
is the thin layer. No-one really knows what it is other than that
something significant happened which could have been a comet hitting
the earth and creating a huge layer of dust like debris. This is
just one theory of why the dinosaurs became extinct.
Keeping up its hands on approach you can look into the
preparation lab where the scientists do their stuff with bones. When
remains are found in the field they are wrapped in plaster to ensure
safe transit back to the museum. In the lab, the scientists
carefully remove the plaster and the rock and other debris around
the carcass. They add a stabilising glue like liquid to the bones to
maintain them and preserve them before they go on display. It looks
like very slow and painstaking work which they do referring to
previous finds and texts describing how the muscle structure works.
Black gold
This whole area is a unique area for geological investigation
and interpretation. What is now the great prairie land stretching
across central Canada and down through the USA used to be the bottom
of a vast, shallow sea and marshland. They have found fossilised and
geographical evidence of a large coral reef and lagoon. This is now
a fair few hundred metres up the side of the Rockies in a layer
known as the Burgess Shale, after the man who found it. This is an
important layer for fossil finds and for unravelling the history of
the Rockies and surrounding landscape. The reef, known as the
Devonian Reef, is what has now created the oil and gas reserves that
are being mined.
One section of the museum has been set aside as a Cretaceous
Garden, simulating what the vegetation would have been like in this
area at the time of the dinosaurs. I had expected it to be slightly
tropical but the air inside was cool. Plant species have come from
all over the world and many of them are familiar to us still today.
They can track back through fossilised seeds to look at the
“genetic” heritage of the plant life as well as the animal life.
Some plant fossils they have uncovered and excavated are in effect
whole pine cones and twigs of trees.
One of the highlights has to be the hall with full size
skeletons of the dinosaurs. They had so many and it was fascinating
just to walk around them and marvel at what it must have been like
to see them alive and in their natural habitat. Some of them are so
huge I find it hard to believe that they could actually move around.
Their bones are the size of small tree trunks. Others are smaller
and delicate, others still were airborne only. Looking at them I
found myself comparing them to whales skeletons and to us. The bone
structures in whale flippers mirror those of the human arm and hand
and I drew parallels to this with some of the dinosaurs.
I have loved watching Time Team on Channel Four, where they
send in a team of archaeologists to uncover the mystery about a
place in three days. This has captivated me in a similar way and
makes me want to come back again. In the summer you can join one of
the teams out in the field and actually take part in the process. I
am sure it is probably very slow progress requiring a lot of
patience but the thrill involved in making a find must be fantastic.
Part way through the day we took a detour from the museum and
headed outside. Following the Dinosaur Trail we came across what is
described as the Little Church and it is. The Church can seat six
people and that is all. But it is not just a tourist attraction, it
is used as a place of meditation and prayers and signs outside ask
people to respect that fact. Even so it is a bit of a curiosity.
Further up the trail we climbed up hill and then turned off to
the Horse Thief Canyon viewpoint. Oil derricks were dotted along the
way with signs warning people to keep away because of poisonous
gases. At the view point I could understand why. The smell of gas
was over powering. The views from here were pretty spectacular. The
scenery and landscape reminded me of Purmamarca in North Western
Argentina (the one place where we lost our film annoyingly!!). The
landscape is sparse and barren but the rocks tell a tale. Different
layers of rock are clearly visible and in bright sunlight are
probably also different shades and colours of the rainbow.
Unfortunately for us it was grey and bitterly cold so we did not
hang around too long.
I was fascinated by Drumheller and the whole of the Badlands
area of this part of Canada. It is very different to anything we
have seen here so far and I somehow feel we have not done it justice
by just stopping off for a few days. It is somewhere I would come
back to again, not just to revisit the museum but also to try and
have the opportunity to experience a dig and just to explore a wider
part of the whole area. Stunning!
