Fodor's Expert Review Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology

The road to Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell Museum is well marked and takes you through the vast flat Canadian prairie. Once a coal-mining area, Drumheller's major industry today is dinosaurs. The museum is in Midland Provincial Park and holds one of the world's largest collections of complete dinosaur skeletons with more than 40 full-size animals. The barren lunar terrain of stark badlands and eerie hoodoos that surround the area seem an ideal setting for the dinosaurs that stalked the countryside 75 million years ago; but in fact, when the dinosaurs were here, the area had a semitropical climate and marshlands not unlike those of the Florida Everglades. You can participate in hands-on museum exhibits and meet the first dinosaur discovered here: Albertosaurus, a smaller version of Tyrannosaurus Rex, or travel the 48-km (30-mi) Dinosaur Trail through the Red Deer Valley and surrounding badlands.