The fossils left behind over the hundreds of millions of years that life has been on this planet give us one of the few rare windows we have into the past. Something that we can see and touch that is a tangible bit of evidence that this much time has passed and this many eras came before our very short existence as a species. I found it harder to fathom when I was inside this museum, and the evidence is overwhelming; these traces of existence still are here. We try to continually uncover their histories and stories.
Another interesting part of this is the stories of these finds themselves, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology has plenty of them posted to read. I had not been here since I was a child, so it was a nice bonus to the visit to be able to see some of the stories of the discoveries that have been made in the time I was last here. Many tales of mining or oil projects that actually assisted in both notifying professionals of these finds and protecting them so that they could properly be extracted and studied by paleontologists.
