The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology: Virtual Museum Tour 2018

One of the most famous places to visit in Alberta, Canada (other than the mountains) is the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology located in Drumheller, Alberta. The newly-renovated museum, dedicated to all things palaeontology, has a massive collected of over 130,000 fossils, a working palaeontology lab, a botanical garden, and so much more.

Even better, the museum is located about 30 minutes from my parents' house, so I have been able to visit multiple times. The last time I explored the museum, I put together a virtual tour for those of you wanting to see what the museum has to offer but are unable to make the journey yourself.

Read on to discover what makes the Royal Tyrrell Museum such a fascinating attraction, and be sure to watch the video at the end to see what it is like to wander the halls!

A bird's eye view of Dinosaur Hall in the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

There is so much to see and do at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and I could probably turn this post in a 30 page document if I attempted to describe everything. So I will do my best to explain what the museum entails and what you can expect to see, but just at a superficial level. (It is better to see it in person, after all.)

You can begin your exploration of the 'museum' outside during the summer months. There is a staircase leading to the top of one of the front hills with a great panoramic view of the museum and the Drumheller Badlands. I recommend doing this during the summer, as the Badlands valley is amazing, with their various layers, colors, and rock formations.

The Tyrrell Museum as seen from the lookout point in the summer. This is closed in the winter.

You can truly experience the nature around the museum by walking the Badlands Interpretive Trail, which is a long, looping pathway that takes visitors on a sprawling hike around curated portions of the Badlands. It takes about 45 minutes to complete on average. I featured the Badlands Interpretive Trail in my "Driving the Dinosaur Trail" video, so feel free to check that out if you are interested.

However, in the winter months the lookout is closed, and the Badlands Interpretive is considered "go at your own risk" and not shovelled or maintained, so you might want to just head straight inside the museum during this season.

Welcome to the Royal Tyrrell Museum - my kids were excited to visit!

For a complete list of museum hours and fees, here is the link to their main site. I don't want to rehash everything here, and if things do change, I don't want the information on my blog to be outdated. When we went last weekend, it was $36 for two adults, a four-year-old, and a two-year-old to purchase general admission passes.

When you first enter the museum, you walk down a dim tunnel decorated with stone carvings, then into the foyer. To your right is the admission desk, washrooms, coat room, and the entrance to the cafeteria. To your left is the gift shop - but I suggest saving that for the end, because the museum's path leads you through the exhibits and then dumps you out at the end in the gift shop. There's no escaping it, so you may as well save it for last.

My son marvelling at the size of the Albertosaurus models.

Once you have settled into the museum with jackets hung, washrooms utilized, and admission paid, you stroll into the first gallery. This one is entitled "Cretaceous Alberta" and puts you face-to-face with a pack of Albertosaurus dinosaurs posed as a pack. The lush backdrops of a semi-tropical Alberta, much different from the area today, makes you feel like you have stepped into a different dimension. Unique lighting in the gallery creates shadows of creeping Albertosaurus dinosaurs on the wall.

The little guy is very detailed, and has nasty teeth!

Around the bend, you smoothly leave the "Cretaceous Alberta" exhibit behind and enter into the "Foundations" exhibit, where the main focus is how fossils are created, discovered, and re-assembled. Examples of bone beds with scattered fossilized remains are mounted so visitors can see what palaeontologists are up against when they first discover dinosaur bones in the ground.

An example of a bone bed where fossils are recovered for display.

Part of the "Foundations" exhibit is a series on evolution, so if you are not into the idea of evolution, this exhibit might not be for you. Although, if you are against evolution, I am guessing the entire dinosaur museum might not be for you...

Skulls from across millennia, showing the evolution of humanity.

Naturally, since the "Foundations" exhibit is all about the basics of fossilization and the discovery and reassembly of said fossils, it makes sense that the next portion of our museum tour leads directly to the Preparation Lab.

The Preparation Lab is exactly what it sounds like: a place where the Tyrrell Museum's palaeontologists and technicians prepare fossils for research and display. A giant windowed wall allows visitors a clear look at how fossils are cleaned, polished, replicated, and whatever else needs to be done to make them museum-ready.

A technician working inside the Tyrrell Museum's Preparation Lab.

If you have a child interested in becoming a palaeontologist, visiting the Preparation Lab is a great place to take him or her. The museum also runs programs in the summer months where visitors have the opportunity to speak directly to a working palaeontologist or museum staff member and ask them questions.

Past the Preparation Lab, visitors are streamed into a room which features the museum's rotating exhibits. This season it was the "Grounds for Discovery" and "Fossils in Focus" on display. As I said before, the museum has over 130,000 pieces, but certainly can't display that many at one time. Therefore, they use this space to feature themed fossils, a way to bring them out of storage and enjoy their time in the limelight.

One of my favourite fossils on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

My kids' favourite piece in this exhibit was the fossilized mud bed that contained several different sets of immortalized dinosaur footprints. Each trail was highlighted with sound effects and glowing lights, demonstrating that particular dinosaur's unique gait and stride.

There was also a partially recovered Nodosaur, which is one of the museum's most precious fossils, dated at 110 MILLION years old. This was a neat artifact, as the half of the Nodosaur that was recovered clearly show the armoured plates on the dinosaur, and its face and neck still have fossilized skin - you can actually see the texture of the dinosaur's outer surface! Very cool!

The amazing Nodosaur fossil.

Leaving this room, you walk up a large ramp leading to the second half of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. It gets a little dark and dim here, as the first ramp leads to another ramp that is covered in thick netting in order to make a tunnel. The entrance to the tunnel is lit up by a circular 'portal' leading you into the various historic periods of the dinosaur. Your first stop: the Precambrian Period, lit in red.

My kids and I outside the 'time travel' tunnel.

My kids really loved this tunnel. They liked how it was so dark, but the 'portal' lights were so bright. At the very end of the tunnel was a glowing wall, filled with water and air bubbles. The lights in the glowing wall would change color slowly, and it was incredibly mesmerizing. (I'd actually enjoy a wall like that in my house, so if the museum ever decides to get rid of it in a future renovation, I'm calling dibs!)

I want a bubble wall like this in my own house! 

As you wind your way through the exhibits - you can never deviate as the exhibits are all designed to funnel you through in one direction - you pass through all of the dinosaur periods. Precambrian, then Palaeozoic, then Mesozoic, then Cenozoic. It is a smooth way to structure the museum, and you eventually work your way up to the mass extinction and the eventual rise of mammals.

I like the design, as it is just about impossible to lose your children. They only have one direction to go: forwards. It is perfect for parents who want to stop and read about the exhibits, but have little ones who are excited and rush to move on ahead to see new things.

This is how my kids and I compare to a dinosaur leg.

Once past the tunnel and the hypnotic bubbling wall, you enter a dark, clear-floored room depicting the underwater world of the "Burgess Shale" exhibit. Giant sea creatures float around you. (They are modelled at 12 times their natural size; don't freak out, they weren't actually that big!) Under the clear floor panels, creepy crawlies are illuminated one-by-one as a disembodied narrator describes what you are looking at. This is NOT a favourite place for my kids, and I've never been able to hang out there for more than a couple of minutes before they want to leave. Oh well.

The weird underwater creatures of the Burgess Shale fossil bed.

Down a flight of stairs, or if you have my children with you, down the elevator, up the elevator, and back down the elevator once more, you enter the "Terrestrial Palaeozoic" gallery. This little hallway features a cute family of fossilized Dimetrodons, which I actually love. A little prehistoric puppy dog-looking fossil called an Ichthyostega just begs to be petted (don't actually pet it).

My son says hello to the cute little Dimetrodons.

This hallway ALSO contains some real life, moving, breathing creepy crawlies. Unlike the squiggly, bug-like models in the "Burgess Shale" exhibit, the bugs featured in the "Terrestrial Palaeozoic" gallery are actually alive. Have fun gawking at a massive tarantula, or getting squeamish over the aquarium filled with scuttling cockroaches, or peering around trying to find the shy scorpion. I am half-fascinated and half-disgusted by this portion of the museum.

The massive tarantula at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

If you continue on the museum's path, you'll find a giant outline of a massive sea creature sketched onto the floor. Recovered pieces of this dinosaur's skeleton are laid out in their proper locations on the floor, helping to give visitors an idea of the scope and size of this one animal. It looks like the model for a submarine, it is so long and wide. I can't imagine the ocean being filled with these at one point. It is an ichthyosaur, also impossibly known as Shonisaurus sikanniensis. Don't ask me to pronounce that!

This outline shows just how humungous this undersea dinosaur was - only part of its fossilized body has been found.

At this point, the streamlined renovation of the museum blends into the original design of the museum I remember from my childhood. (I grew up around here, and even slept overnight inside the museum. So I clearly remember what it used to be like before they made all of their changes.)

Just past the floor-model ichthyosaur, you can veer left and enter the Cretaceous Garden, or you can go straight and enter the famous Dinosaur Hall. Of course, I recommend going left because you do NOT want to miss the Cretaceous Garden!

The Cretaceous Garden in the Royal Tyrrell Museum is a living oasis among the fossils of the dead.

The gardens have been designed to mimic what Alberta might have looked like during the Cretaceous period. I don't even know how accurate the gardens are; what I do know is that they are bright, airy, sunny, and smell amazing. The cheerful brightness is very welcome after strolling for so long in the gloom of the museum. For sure the Cretaceous Gardens gallery is my kids' favourite space in the museum. I basically had to drag them kicking and screaming out of the room when it was time to move on!

Visitors can stroll the garden in circuitous path, with a small lookout positioned in the centre. Plants include orchids, ferns, mosses, ivy, and other things that I don't know the name for. It is so lush and humid, with an earthy smell that makes me think of summer and digging in my garden. If you look carefully enough, you can find small, living creatures lounging beside the little in-house stream that flows through the centre of the garden: frogs, toads, and salamanders to name a few.

A beautiful flower - an orchid? - blooms in the middle of the Cretaceous Garden.

If you can bring yourself to leave the gardens, you will be automatically directed into Dinosaur Hall. This wide-open warehouse-like space is filled with some of the Royal Tyrrell Museum's most famous skeletons. The Tyrannosaurus Rex might be the quintessential Tyrell Museum piece, featured on almost all of their media. My husband loves the Triceratops, with its triple horns. This space is cavernous and features so many different specimens, so please give yourself ample time to go through it.

Within Dinosaur Hall there is a stand-alone room, once again dark and dim, that features some of the museums larger intact ocean fossils. A few are even suspended in the air above you. Don't forget to walk through the ocean room while strolling through Dinosaur Hall!

A swimming dinosaur fossil is suspended overhead in a portion of Dinosaur Hall.

A tunnel leads visitors out of Dinosaur Hall and into the next exhibit. But don't just pass through the little tunnel space and move on. Inside this little archway is an overview of one of history's most important moments: the mass extinction of the dinosaur. Sit for a spell and watch a video outlining some of the more prevalent theories on how dinosaurs disappeared from the planet.

Beyond this tunnel is one more hallway that blends three last galleries. The "Devonian Reef" gallery is really just a large fish tank featuring some soft-shelled turtles (although soft-shelled turtles are insanely cool!!!). The "Mammal Hall" depicts some of the more interesting mammals that arose from the extinction of the dinosaurs, from small to large.

My favourite exhibit: the mammoth fighting off two sabre-toothed tigers.

Finally, the "Ice Age" exhibit features an amazing diorama of a gigantic mammoth fighting off skeletal sabre-toothed tigers. This might be my favourite part of the museum - yes, I like the mammal skeleton the best in a dinosaur museum - but just the way this section has been designed is so impressive. The mammoth fossil is incredible, but also the scene in which it has been placed, with one tiger attacking it from atop a cliff, while another nips at its ankles, is so dramatic. The lighting and backdrop are also first-rate. I love this diorama so much.

My mom and kids with the mammoth. It is dim in the museum, so photos don't always turn out great!

And then you are streamed into the gift shop, as I stated before. And it never fails: we always seem to leave with a few things each time we visit. T-Rexes on a stick that chomp their jaws, glow-in-the-dark jellyfish paperweights, a cute T-shirt, dinosaur eggs that hatch... you name it, we've probably taken it home at some point. Dinosaur toys are just so much fun!

Keep in mind, this virtual tour describes the museum's set-up for 2018. While a lot of the exhibits I have described are permanent, some of the items are part of their rotating stock, so if you visit in the future, you might end up seeing something completely new and exciting.

Please watch the video below to truly experience this virtual tour of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. If you liked the video, I beg you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and help me reach 1000 subscribers!