The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, in Drumheller, Alberta, is widely regarded as the country's foremost institution devoted only to the study of prehistoric life. Each year well over four hundred thousand visitors explore its extensive galleries and take part in its many educational programs, which include guided fossil excursions, documentary screenings, academic lectures, practical workshops, and residential summer science camps. The museum is also a substantial research organization. It sends its scientists to excavation sites throughout the world and carries out meticulous conservation work. Although it began as a comparatively modest regional exhibition, it is now recognized as an official agency of the Government of Alberta.

The museum owes much of its present character to two strikingly dissimilar individuals. Hannah Grey, a schoolteacher-turned-palaeontologist, assembled its earliest specimens. Peter Voss, a mining engineer, was distinguished by his philanthropic inclinations. Grey aspired to build a place where ordinary Albertans could observe the extraordinary creatures that had once inhabited the region. Voss intended to furnish the province with an institution capable of rivalling the magnificent halls he had admired overseas. Although Voss was at first preoccupied only with rocks and minerals, he later developed a considerable fascination with the living world as well, and upon his death he bequeathed to the museum a substantial collection of pressed prairie vegetation. As a result, the institution addresses both the remote geological past and the contemporary natural world, a duality that renders it genuinely unique among the museums of the continent.