The wild west

 We don't go to many museums but we have been to a few really good ones lately.

Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump is a historic site in southern Alberta near where the prairies meet the Rockies.  The museum is located at one of the sites where the Blackfoot people used to drive herds of bison (buffalo) over a cliff as a method of gathering their main source of sustenance. The building is set into the ridge with most of it underground.  Large tribes/communities relied on bison for their food, clothing and shelters (tipis). Herds used to number in the hundreds of thousands and when they were wiped out in the 1870-1880s the Blackfoot and other tribes like them lost their mode of survival. Completely.

 

We then drove through part of the Canadian Badlands to Dinosaur Provincial Park where we camped. More big dinosaur fossils have been found here than anywhere else on earth and the fantastic Royal Tyrrell Museum in nearby Drumheller is part laboratory part public museum. It contains some of the best displays of dinosaurs (and lots of other prehistoric animals nobody cares much about) anywhere in the world. Most of the displays are actual fossils found in the local area by paleontologists and construction workers. Every work crew involved in mining, quarrying, road construction etc in this area has a palaeontologist watching over their shoulder. And they find a lot.