Qualla: Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital

Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drive an hour northeast of Calgary across flat Alberta wheat country and the road simply falls away. The Red Deer River has cut a 120-metre gash into the prairie, exposing bands of grey shale, rust sandstone, and seams of black coal that stack like the pages of a half-buried book. Every layer is a record of something that lived and died here long before there was a Drumheller, or a prairie, or a continent shaped like the one outside the window. This is the badlands, and 75 million years ago it was a coastal lowland crawling with dinosaurs. Their bones have been weathering out of these cliffs ever since. In 1884 a young Geological Survey of Canada surveyor named Joseph Burr Tyrrell - looking for coal, not fossils - tripped over a skull that turned out to belong to a previously unknown predator. He named it Albertosaurus. The skull is still here, in the museum that bears his name, in the small town that calls itself, with some justification, the Dinosaur Capital of the World.

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Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital: Tyrrell's Skull

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Joseph Tyrrell was 26 and looking for coal seams to feed Canada's expanding railways when he found the skull on a hillside near what is now Midland Provincial Park. He recognized immediately that it belonged to something nobody had described. The fossil sat in storage in Ottawa f...

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Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital: Black Beauty and the Hall of Bones

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Inside the museum, the main hall stops people in their tracks. Forty mounted skeletons stand in a single long room - duck-bills with crested skulls, horned ceratopsians, armored ankylosaurs the size of small cars, and at the centre a Tyrannosaurus rex called Black Beauty, named f...

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Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital: Tyra

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Downtown Drumheller commits unreservedly to the bit. Every business has a dinosaur outside its door. Trash cans wear dinosaur snouts. A fibreglass herd grazes the median strip on the main street. And at the visitor centre stands Tyra, the World's Largest Dinosaur - an 86-foot fib...

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Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital: The Hoodoos

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fifteen minutes east of town on Highway 10, a stretch of badlands has been worn into a forest of stone mushrooms. The hoodoos form because a layer of harder sandstone caps a column of softer mudstone underneath; rain and wind eat the soft rock from the sides until only a narrow p...

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Drumheller: Dinosaur Capital: The Coal Town That Forgot

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before it was a dinosaur town, Drumheller was a coal town. Between 1911 and the 1970s, more than 130 mines worked the seams along the Red Deer River, and at its peak the valley held 30,000 people across a string of company towns: Wayne, Rosedale, East Coulee, Atlas. The coal was ...

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