When Humans Roamed The Badlands

When you've timed your Alberta visit so poorly that the very last Stetson has vacated the Stampede grounds, and any noteworthy wildlife have all but hibernated, what do you do? You stop. Blink. And remind yourself that you're in beautiful Alberta. Then, you pay a visit to Calgary zoo and take that desperate, customary photo of a Grizzly (cropping out any evidence of the enclosure), because you can't journey through both British Columbia and Alberta without having had a legitimate bear sighting! Once that particular mission is complete, you can rest easy. Preferably in the car, for approximately ninety minutes while your fiancée navigates his way to Drumheller - Dinosaur Capital of the World.
Given its recommendation by my geologist sister (need I say more), Drumheller was not high on our list of priorities. It was a place to visit should we have a day spare, and as luck would have it we had one. Our final day in Canada as it were.
We left the grid of Calgary that very morning and passed the outlying prairies, before The Badlands (even the name compels you to visit) rose from the depths, the red-striped hills and craters, banded buttes and spiked rock formations transporting us back sixty million years. I had almost expected to see woolly mammoth tusks freshly decomposed in the dried up valleys, and had the palaeontologists of Royal Tyrrell Museum not already excavated the area I would have brought my fossil brush. Instead we roamed the museum, where said paleontologists have constructed nine galleries of expertly detailed exhibits, from the Cretaceous to the Triassic period, with skeletons and fossils up to, and over two hundred million years old. You just can't put a price on the level of insignificance felt when pressing a fingertip to such a bone fragment (where permitted of course). Perhaps most impressive was the fully reconstructed T-Rex skeleton, towering over visitors as they wandered past the 'Lords of the Land', where many of the surrounding skeletons were assembled just as they had been recovered - still in the 'death pose'. Extinction of these beasts was carefully and compellingly covered and, if I may be so controversial, had me questioning everything I understood about climate change. It's the questions you ask yourself for days to come that are the true test of a great tale - which is exactly what this museum was - the story of life and death since time began, and hands down the definitive highlight of our trip.