Our friend Sally from Australia is visiting, so in early July we took a seven-day drive around nice bits of Western Canada, notably including the badlands-and-dinosaur country of Southern Alberta. I’ll run some dinosaur shots over the next few days.

Drumheller — where, oddly, my uncle was once bank manager — is at the center of all this. Just outside town is The Tyrrell, a really extremely nice museum of palaeontology. Tons and tons of dinos, models and fossils both.

Dinosaur face from the Tyrrell

The eyes are a bit fanciful — it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what they looked like — but there are grounds to believe in the rendition of the skin. They actually have a dinosaur-skin fossil, I forget the details of how the impression was rendered onto the mud, and the scales are sized and shaped about as shown here. The color, like the eyes, will remain a mystery I guess. And you have to love the tiny hint of smile.

I didn’t take notes, don’t know what kind of dinosaur this is. If you care about that kind of thing go the museum already, you won’t regret it.



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From: stand (Jul 16 2009, at 08:36)

The family trip to Drumheller back in the 70's was one of the highlights of my dinosaur-obsessed childhood. Ahh...memories.

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From: Tony Fisk (Jul 16 2009, at 16:19)

Looks like a tyrannosaur (small forelegs?)

Given the locality, and the fact that you appear to be looking up at him/her, I would say albertosaur (T.Rex's 'little' brother) I suspect you have a 10yo resident expert.

Eyes could have been slitted, and could have been baby blues, I suppose. It's unlikely that the whites showed: too much of a give away (human eyes are unusual in this regard)

Australia has had relatively few fossil finds (although some fossils are opalised). This appears set to change, with the recent discovery of three new skeletons

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