Royal Saskatchewan Museum Trip!

So, during my week off my family and I took the chance to finally stop in and check out the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina.

My eldest is 3, almost 4, and my youngest is 1 and a half... so we figured a trip to see some dinosaur skeletons would be perfect. Prior to this, my eldest didn't have much care one way or another for dinosaurs, but hoooo-boy, he's super jazzed about them now!

Apparently, this is the home of "the world's largest T-Rex Skeleton", or at least, that's what some signs we saw on the way in mentioned - and what their website states. I'm no expert on dinosaur skeletons, but the t-rex exhibit is awesomely large.

But, more on that big chonker later.

This little guy was one of the first we stopped at in the T-Rex room, and it is apparently the smallest they have there. I forget what it is as I didn't think ahead enough to take a picture of the placard telling me about it. Still, though, it looks pretty cool!

We also found a digital colouring program thing, where we could texture and colour a t-rex. It was pretty neat, and we spent a few minutes messing around making some pretty wild colour and texture combos. It's hard to see in this photo because of the reflection, but it's got a pink-brown-yellow

There was a lot to look at in the first room. These are some fossilized leaves, which is pretty neat! Though, the kids were less impressed with this than I was.

The museum has a lot of displays like this, where we see broken-off teeth, bits of shoulder blades, etc. They all had really interesting little writeups beside them.

Here we have - as you can see - the 'World's smallest & youngest T.Rex specimen'. It's a foot, which is super cool... particularly when compared to...

An adult foot! Holy smokes this thing is huge.

Another super neat find (that I unfortunately botched by getting part of my stupid finger in the frame), was these fossilized dinosaur eggs!

Below, we have a juvenile skull, and some random partial bits that were found in Saskatchewan - some of which are still being prepared for exhibit, so not everything unearthed is currently on display here.

What's this?! It's dino poop!

We had a good time when my eldest was told what this was. He thought it was pretty fantastic that we had what is apparently the world's only known fossilized t-rex poop. Who'd have thought that Saskatchewan of all places would be where we'd find something as rare as this?

This next section was an underwater theme, and it was super dark in here with all kinds of ambient sounds. My eldest didn't mind it too much, but the youngest... she was not a fan. My camera also wasn't a big fan of this (I didn't bring my real camera and was just trying to make the best of my phone), so some of these are pretty grainy sadly.

^{Light-up Spiderman shoes making an appearance!}

After the underwater bit, we got a few neat little dioramas. They were really well done, and there were quite a few of them throughout the museum. My eldest was very disappointed that they weren't something he could play with. (Which I get, I mean... they look so fun to play with, don't they?)

In this section too, we also got to the first specimen that we could actually touch. If I recall correctly, it is the only actual bone we were allowed to touch and it was super freaking cool. If you have trouble reading the plaque, it tells us that this bone is nearly 70 million years old, and briefly describes the process of fossilization.

In this section was a lot of skulls, and other neat fossilized bones.

The Triceratops skull was particularly awesome. It's huge. 3yo head and shoulders for scale. :P




This guy is apparently a distant relative of the horse, rhino, and tapir. They've been extinct for around 32 million years.


And this guy is, as the shape implies, a distant relative of buffallo, if I recall correctly. I think of all the exibits we saw, this one might have been my very favorite. The size here is hard to really judge in the photo, but this thing was HUGE.

And finally, the only shot on my camera without my kid's faces in it of the World's Largest T-Rex! We're on the second-floor balcony here, looking down on it. The orange pad on the right has a button on it that causes a roar, and shakes the pad. We spent... god, probably 30 minutes alone pressing that button. It was a blast!

And, that's all from me! We had a blast at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. There were a lot more exhibits beyond just dinosaurs, but to keep this a reasonable size I decided to omit most of those. If you're ever for some reason finding yourself in Regina, Saskatchewan... definitely stop in and check it out! It's a pretty neat time!