Royal Tyrrell Museum

If you’re traveling with "Jurassic World"-minded children, you should consider a day trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in the rugged Canadian Badlands near the town of Drumheller, about an hour and a half from Calgary.

The badlands hold some of the richest deposits of dinosaur fossils in the world. The museum is named for Joseph Burr Tyrrell, a geologist who discovered Albertosaurus sarcophagus, a fierce meat-eating cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, while searching for coal seams along the Red Deer River. Still encased in hard rock it is displayed in the Lords of the Land exhibit.

With display areas the size of a football field, the museum contains more than 130,000 fossils, with more than 800 on permanent display. Thirty articulated skeletons stand in Dinosaur Hall, along with reconstructions of large plant-eaters such as triceratops and camarasaurus.

Guided hikes are offered through the sandstone hoodoo rocks. You can watch paleontologists at work in the lab, take part in a fossil search, learn digging techniques on a realistic excavation site and create a fossil cast to take home as a souvenir.

The museum operates an intensive collection and research program in paleontology, and new specimens are found each year in nearby Dinosaur Provincial Park.