Badlands

Although I hid behind my hands for parts of Jurassic Park, I've been fascinated with the treasures to be found in what is often called 'the badlands'. 

At Drumheller, the Royal Tyrrell Museum has stories about how workers in a range of industries - construction, mining, roadbuilding - have found amazing fossils while digging around Alberta. The  museum runs a research program that helped identify Albertosaurus (think T Rex on steroids) or Edmontonia, an armoured plated herbivore.

In Australia you can visit Winton and check out Australovenator wintonensis, or Diamantinasaurus matildae. You can even help dig them up. In Alberta, although it seems almost anyone can find a new species of dinosaur fossil, you need to be a researcher with a license to remove dinosaur bones from the ground. 

Looking at the dinosaur tracks, you can imagine the ghost of these creatures chasing each other through the muddy riverbed.

Here at Drumheller in the Canadian Badlands, you can also take a walk back in time, exploring the fossil record and thinking about how fast you would have to be to outrun a dinosaur.

It seems that's about 40km/hour (or around 25miles/hour).

Which is just a fraction more than my best time sporting flip-flops in the mud.