Roadtrip to the Dinosaurs

I always knew that Canada was a big country. Big enough to once have had dinosaurs roaming it's land. Now that's pretty impressive.
The hubby, the station wagon & I just returned from a week long road trip to Calgary & Drumheller (where the dinosaurs are) in Alberta. Took us a good 12 hours to drive there from Vancouver and was somewhat tough on the behind, if you get my drift. Still, the scenery was quite worthwhile. To transverse from the wet & rocky coast of BC to the dry flat plains of Alberta was a lesson in real time as to how wide & diverse Canada really is.

Ok, back to the dinosaurs.

Drumheller is a little town in the valley of the same name. It's about an hour from Calgary if you gun it. You're driving through rolling fields which suddenly give way to steep, dry coulees (or badlands) ridged with the strata of hundreds of years of erosion by time, wind and the Red Deer River.

The cool thing is that there is a dinosaur called the Albertasuarus that was a tyrannosaurid. The same family as the famous T. Rex. and according to wikipedia " Albertosaurus was a bipedal predator with a massive head, jaws lined with dozens of large teeth and tiny, two-fingered 'hands'. It may have been at the top of the food chain in its local ecosystem. Although relatively large for a theropod, Albertosaurus was much smaller than its more famous relative Tyrannosaurus, probably weighing only as much as a modern black rhinoceros."

The Royal Tyrrell museum where I spent the best $10 in a some months was filled with tonnes of exhibits of full scale dino skeletons all hooked up in their larger-than-life glory.
Info on what the planet was like those 70+ million years ago when the dinosaurs ruled was clear and written magazine-like, which greatly appealed to my MTV mind.
Kids must love this place, because when we were there, there were hordes roaming the exhibition galleries. They had magical timing too. Just when you're about to take a photo, they'll step right into your shot. Well, at least I got these that I put here on the blog.

And when we got back to Calgary and went for dinner at a lovely steak place called Saltlik, I got chance to get a picture of another skeleton,. It's my favourite. I think I'll call it DinoHorsey.