It was another weekend of not getting much work done. Today Bianca, Sina and I joined a trip to the Royal Tyrell Museum just outside of Drumheller. This area is known as the Badlands due to its dramatic landscape, and has a long history going back 70 million years. This is a rich dinosaur fossil area and some incredible fossils have been found here. Drumheller used to be on the edge of the Bear Paw Sea which severed North America in two from north to south, then it became a tropical paradise before being covered by ice sheets 1 km thick about 2 million year ago. 11 000 years ago the ice melted, creating Drumheller Valley and the dry landscape we know today.
It was a great trip which reminded me of the mind-boggling degree of change this Earth and its inhabitants have undergone. It's so hard to imagine that all the creatures, including ourselves go back to the beginning of life on Earth. We saw a replica of our ancestor, a 30 cm worm-like creature that was the start of vertebrates. (On a side note, I guess that humankind will succeed in preventing natural evolution due to rapid climate change and habitat destruction. )
The landscape is pretty inspiring too. There is a great sense of space and peace out there, though I wouldn't like summer when the ground temperature can get up to 50 C!
The town itself is a dump, an endless sprawl of houses and ramshackle shops and businesses. The outskirts of Calgary is pretty hideous too - a vast dry landscape interspersed with mining, industry and houses. To be fair it probably looks better in summer when everything is green. Right now we're just coming out of winter and all the grass is brown. I also noted that no matter how mediocre or fancy the suburb, huge 4x4 trucks are parked outside every house.
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