Sunday, June 27, 2010

Mega road trip - Day 26

In the morning, we spent a couple of hours doing an educational program with the kids at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, AB.  An educator led us on a short 3 km walk out to an area where she explained a bit about the geology (too low level, even for kids, in my opinion, but we're one of those weird homeschooling families that often uses adult-level educational material with the kids). 

After the explanation of how sand forms sandstone, mud forms mudstone, and other "informative" facts, she let us look around a small area for dinosaur bones and petrified wood.  It was obviously a salted area but the kids enjoyed it.   Here's my family looking for material:


It was very hard for me (and others as well, I'm sure) to toss all the neat bone fragments back onto the ground after we were done (it was in a Provincial Park and collecting is illegal).  Here's what typical dinosaur bone material here looks like:


Many of the remains are from the herbivore Edmontosaurus - later we walked to one weathering out of the a layer but deemed too difficult to collect because it's in ironstone which is difficult to separate from the bone material (and they have plenty of specimens anyway).


Also present in the area is Albertosaurus - a T. rex. type theropod (bipedal meat-eating) dinosaur.  After lunch, we had a long drive down to Helena, MT.  Tomorrow is Yellowstone.

No comments:

Post a Comment