Royal Tyrrell Museum
Entrance
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| Established | September 25, 1985 |
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| Location | Highway 838 Midland Provincial Park Drumheller, Alberta T0J 0Y0 Canada |
| Coordinates | 51°28′46″N 112°47′21″W / 51.479361°N 112.789278°W |
| Type | Palaeontological |
| Visitors | >400,000/year (2009/10) |
| Director | Andrew Neuman |
| Website | www.tyrrellmuseum.com |
The Royal Tyrrell Museum is a Canadian tourist attraction and a centre of palaeontological research noted for its collection of more than 130,000 fossils.
Located 6 km (4 mi) northwest from Drumheller, Alberta and 135 km (84 mi) northeast from Calgary, the museum is situated in the middle of the fossil-bearing strata of the Late Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon Formation and holds numerous specimens from the Alberta badlands, Dinosaur Provincial Park and the Devil's Coulee Dinosaur Egg Site.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum is operated by Alberta's Ministry of Culture.
The Museum is named in honour of Joseph Burr Tyrrell, a geologist who accidentally discovered the first reported dinosaur fossil in the Red Deer River valley in 1884 while searching for coal seams. The carnivorous dinosaur was later named Albertosaurus sarcophagus. The museum opened September 25, 1985 and was given "Royal" status in 1990.
More than 4,400 square metres (47,000 sq ft) of the museum's 11,200 square metres (121,000 sq ft) is dedicated to exhibits in a series of chronological galleries celebrating the 3.9-billion-year-history of life on Earth. One of the most popular is "Dinosaur Hall", with over 40 mounted dinosaur skeletons, including specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex, Albertosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Other exhibits include "Lords of the Land", a gallery of some of the most dangerous theropods known from Alberta, "Burgess Shale", a diorama of dozens of creatures from Yoho National Park in British Columbia; "Devonian Reef", a life-size model of a 375-million-year old reef; the newly renovated "Cretaceous Garden", featuring representatives of the plants that lived in prehistoric Alberta, and "Age of Mammals" and "Ice Ages" which cover mammalian life in the Cenozoic. Dioramas painted by Vladimir Krb. Also on display is the "Triassic Giant", a 1,700 square feet (160 m2) specimen of the world's largest known marine reptile. The 21 metres (69 ft) long ichthyosaur Shastasaurus sikanniensis was recovered from the shores of the Sikanni Chief River in northeastern British Columbia by a team led by Elizabeth Nicholls, former curator of Marine Reptiles. This exhibit pays homage to the work of Nicholls, who died in 2004.
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