DINOSAURS!!

An hour and a half east of Calgary is a town called Drumheller in the Alberta Badlands. It has a long history of coal mining, but today it is known mainly for dinosaur fossils and the absolutely awesome Royal Tyrrell Museum.

With the pleasant weather (rare for the May long weekend in Alberta), we joined the throngs taking in the museum today.

Although many of the visitors were probably out-of-town tourists seeing the museum for the first time, for locals like us, the real draw was a new exhibit.

Featured in an article in National Geographic, the museum has a new nodosaur with a remarkable degree of preservation.

As you can see, the surface scales and spikes have been preserved.

The detail is amazing.

Some fun facts; this guy lived about 110 million years ago, making him the oldest dinosaur fossil ever found in Alberta. He was over five metres in length and would have weighed about 1300 kg. This particular nodosaur represents a new, as yet unnamed, genus and species.

-Rognar-