Have you ever wanted to get the Jurassic Park experience, without the boat trip and utter chaos? The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is here for you.
Friday marks the start of “,” the museum’s latest exhibit out of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto that aims to get visitors up and close with dinosaurs using both new and old techniques.
Visitors can run or walk along with life-size video projections of sauropods, which you may recognize from its long neck, according to the museum. People can examine the skeleton of the , a predator with horns over its eyes, and use augmented reality to lay skin over the bones. A 3-D printer will create models of real fossils.
But museum originalists can rest easy, there’s something for them, too. The exhibit includes 17 fully articulated skeletons and dozens of fossils, including dinosaurs discovered by DMNS scientists. The Fossil Prep Lab will let people try fossil preparation techniques. Microfossil sifters will demonstrate how paleontologists search for microfossils, according to the museum.
The exhibit comes after . The fossils are some of .
The exhibit runs Oct. 6 through Jan. 15. Admission to “Ultimate Dinosaurs” is free with general admission. Hours are 9 a.m.-5p.m. daily, except Dec. 25.
To get yourself excited, here are some fun facts to pull out at happy hour with friends:
- The nigersaurus had a mouth that people affectionately compared to a vacuum cleaner. The dinosaurs had 50 columns of teeth lined tightly along a square jaw that was about a foot deep, according to . Each tooth had nine replacements waiting in the wings after a tooth was worn down, the museum said. If you’re looking for a bad joke: What’s a dentist’s favorite dinosaur…
- The masiakasaurus knopfleri is a biped carnivore named after the musician Mark Knopfler because the paleontologists who discovered the dinosaur in Madagascar were
- The carcharodontosaurus, another carnivore, was discovered in 1927. Unfortunately, many of the fossils were destroyed in the bombing of Germany during World War II. The cast in the Ultimate Dinosaur exhibit is the only remaining complete skull.
