3 months ago, you joined me on my descent into the badlands of Drumheller. This is the sequel for the Wednesday Walk challenge championed by our friend
@tattoodjay and the Make me Smile Collaboration challenge lead by 
@elizacheng. The basic idea is going for a walk, taking pictures, sharing stories and making people smile.
This Weds, I bring you the second era, reemerging from an ancient swamp in the Alberta badlands and visit with the dinosaurs of Drumheller!
In case you couldn't be arsed to visit the first halt of the tale as linked in the first sentence of this post, allow me to try and catch you up in 34 words or less. The Royal Tyrell Museum is situated in the belly of an ancient swamp that kicks out thousands of fossils per year, and is a history lesson of a place to visit with Zeke.
I would also recommend reading a little about Joseph Tyrell https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joseph-tyrrell as a monument to the archaeological discoveries in the region almost a hundreds years ago. What a gig!
The epic intro left us staring into the star gate of time transportation covering eras 4.6 billion years in the making.
Apparently their calculations are a little off mine but you get the picture. This is not ordinary collection of fossilized bones, it is a history lesson of all encompassing proportion. Surely I cannot do it justice but I can show you some of the scary creatures in this huge exhibit.
I was thinking about the cartoon movie Ice Age when shooting this picture. Is that Ray Romano?
Plenty of people joined me in this adventure enjoying stories and lessons on hundreds of plaques in front of hundreds of prehistoric creatures.
I remember liking triceratops and the bipedal predators as a kid. This exhibit represents the dawn of my fascination with dinosaurs.
The textures and colours on some of the flare outside of the fossils were even well done. I snap so many of these stock/background pictures that I should go through them and collect a big folder to share as stock for other bloggers.
This place is a photographers playground with all of the different vantage points to shoot so many exotic paleontological assemblies!
The knowledge and process it takes to properly extract, study and present seems like a different world entirely as far as disciplines and careers go
Mass extinction. What a foreign concept for humans! Consider a single event that causes the extinction of 50% of the species on the planet. Imagine what that would look like now. For me, imagining that this has happened 5 times already is a heavy wake up call. I am not sure whether the most sobering part is that it is more than possible, but patterns continue and another is inevitable! Maybe I should just shoot more pictures and enjoy my tour!
Here we are swimming with the aquatic dinos.
This cool customer is native to the area and is named Prosaurolophos. So neat to imagine duck billed huge lizards wandering around outside as they might have a few hundred million years ago.
Face to face with a creature from childhood fantasy!
This is one of the countless huge rooms in this deceptively massive museum. I had no idea what we were in for and highly encourage you to visit if you make it to the Calgary area or anywhere close!
It was a little bit of a drive from civilization but definitely worth it. There are trails and tours through the surrounding badlands that produced many of these fossils but we were spent from the time in the complex. Not so much that we couldn't snap a pic of the facility from the ridge.
Seemingly just over that ridge is the vast plains with hundreds of miles of wheat fields. Before that, I can only imagine how many thousands of fossils are all around, just under the surface of the ridges and hoodoos. What a place!
Thanks for joining me on this mile back from the Badlands. We travelled 4 billion years in a blink by the magic of the blockchain.