🇨🇦 Canada · The Prairies
Drumheller is a town in south-central Alberta set in the spectacular Red Deer River valley, in the heart of the Canadian badlands: a surreal landscape of eroded gullies, ravines, striped plateaus and curious rock formations called hoodoos, in astonishing contrast with the flat prairie that surrounds it. But what has made this land famous worldwide is what it hides below the surface: it's one of the richest dinosaur fossil beds on the planet.
Drumheller has made a name for itself as the 'dinosaur capital of the world'. Its great attraction is the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the best paleontology museums in the world, with an extraordinary collection of skeletons and fossils. The whole region breathes the theme: a giant tyrannosaur statue looms over the town, and the surroundings offer routes through the badlands, the hoodoos, old coal mining towns and lookouts over a one-of-a-kind landscape.
This guide covers the essentials of Drumheller and the badlands with a practical eye: the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the hoodoos and the lookouts, the drives through the valley and the mining remains, and how to get there and get around on a very popular day trip from Calgary. It's one of the most singular destinations in Canada, a journey through geological time and the age of the dinosaurs at once.
The Red Deer River valley, carved by glacial meltwater, exposed rock layers extremely rich in fossils of dinosaurs that lived tens of millions of years ago. The region was the territory of plains peoples (Blackfoot and others). Drumheller was born in the early 20th century as a coal mining town, since coal was abundant in the valley. The discovery of spectacular fossils and the opening of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in 1985 turned the town into a world center of paleontology and tourism. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of the prairies and the Rockies: Blackfoot and Cree land, land of cattle ranching and oil, home of Banff —Canada's first national park—, of Lake Louise and of the dinosaurs of Drumheller.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Drumheller's extraordinary wealth began to take shape tens of millions of years ago, during the Cretaceous, when this region of Alberta was a warm, humid coastal plain crossed by rivers and populated by dinosaurs. When these animals died, their remains were sometimes buried quickly by sediment, which allowed them to fossilize in the rock layers that piled up over millions of years.
Much later, at the end of the last ice age, the enormous flows of glacial meltwater cut hard into the Red Deer River valley, slicing deep into the prairie and exposing those ancient fossil-laden rock layers. The result is the badlands landscape we see today: gullies, ravines and hoodoos where continuous erosion keeps exposing, year after year, new remains of dinosaurs and of prehistoric life.
That unique combination —an exceptional fossil record buried away and a valley that lays it bare— made the region of Drumheller and the nearby Dinosaur Provincial Park (a World Heritage Site) one of the best places in the world for dinosaur paleontology.
Before the tourist dinosaurs, what gave rise to Drumheller and kept it alive was coal. In the early 20th century the Red Deer valley was found to be extraordinarily rich in coal seams, and the region went through a mining boom. Dozens of mines opened along the valley, and mining towns sprang up quickly to house the workers, many of them immigrants from Europe and other parts of the world, drawn by the jobs.
Drumheller, founded and developed in this context, became the center of a prosperous coal basin. The coal that was mined was loaded through large wooden structures (tipples) and shipped out by rail. Life around the mines, hard and dangerous, shaped the identity and the multicultural makeup of the area through the first decades of the 20th century.
Over time, the decline in coal demand —displaced by oil and gas, abundant in Alberta— led to the progressive closure of the mines by mid-century. The heritage of that era, like the Atlas Coal Mine turned into a historic site, is a reminder today of the past that came before the valley's paleontological fame.
Scientific interest in the fossils of the Red Deer valley went back a long way: as early as the late 19th century, the geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell, while prospecting for coal for the Geological Survey of Canada, found the skull of a carnivorous dinosaur in the area, an early sign of the enormous paleontological wealth of the place. Through the 20th century, the region established itself as one of the great centers of dinosaur discoveries in the world.
The turning point came in 1985 with the opening of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, named after that pioneer. The museum, with modern facilities and an exceptional collection, put Drumheller on the world paleontology map and drew a growing number of visitors. The declining mining economy thus found a new engine in scientific and family tourism.
Since then, Drumheller has fully embraced its Jurassic identity: it proclaimed itself the 'dinosaur capital of the world', put up the largest dinosaur statue in the world and filled the town with prehistoric figures and themes. Today the dinosaur story and the coal mine story live side by side in a valley of unique landscape, which combines the spectacle of the badlands with a fascinating journey through the deep history of the Earth.
Long before coal and dinosaurs drew outsiders, the Red Deer River valley and the prairies of Alberta were the territory of Indigenous plains peoples, especially the Blackfoot Confederacy (Niitsitapi), along with the Plains Cree, the Nakoda (Stoney) and others. For these peoples, life revolved around the bison, which they hunted on the vast prairies and which gave them food, shelter, tools and raw material for almost everything.
The badlands landscape itself, with its strange shapes and its bones poking out of the rock, did not go unnoticed by them. There are stories and traditions that interpreted those fossil remains —the great bones of unknown creatures— within their worldview, long before Western science classified them as dinosaurs. The river that gives the valley its name, the Red Deer, is in fact a rough translation of an Indigenous name referring to the wapiti (elk), abundant on its banks.
The arrival of European settlers, the railway and coal mining in the early 20th century radically transformed this world. Recognizing that Indigenous presence, both earlier and ongoing, is part of a fuller understanding of the valley's history, which begins neither with the coal nor with the museums.
After Joseph Burr Tyrrell's find in 1884, the Red Deer valley and the area of today's Dinosaur Provincial Park became, in the early 20th century, the stage for a feverish competition among paleontologists: the so-called 'Great Canadian Dinosaur Rush'. Teams from museums in Canada and the United States —among them figures like Barnum Brown, of the American Museum of Natural History, and the Sternberg family, famous fossil hunters hired by the Geological Survey of Canada— combed the badlands, digging up spectacular skeletons that are now on display in museums around the world.
Out of these lands came some of the most emblematic and best preserved dinosaurs known: hadrosaurs (the 'duck-billed dinosaurs'), ceratopsids like Centrosaurus, and large carnivores like Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus, relatives of Tyrannosaurus. The density and quality of the finds has almost no equal on the planet, and Dinosaur Provincial Park, downstream, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 precisely for its paleontological value.
That long tradition of discoveries is the foundation on which the Royal Tyrrell Museum was built in 1985, and what keeps Drumheller and its surroundings at the front line of world paleontology. Every season, the erosion of the badlands keeps revealing new fossils, so the deep history of the valley is never quite finished being written.