TRACKING DINOSAURS IN TEXAS
Families wanting to dig deeper into their fascination with dinosaurs after seeing “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” which opens this weekend, can take a road trip across Texas to walk inside reallife dino tracks, touch fossilized specimens and use augmented reality to experience a day in the life of the prehistoric beasts.
At Moody Gardens’ new “Dinos Alive” exhibit, 15 animatronic dinosaurs are living under a 30-foot tent, craning their necks toward visitors and moving their eyes to take in the surroundings. The setup asks visitors to step past the scene of a plane crash to help search for the missing crew. Along their way, they’ll hear the roars of dinos, the squawk of their babies hatching from eggs and the flow of a stream, where one dino has caught a fish that will become his lunch.
But “the centerpiece of it all” is the full-size Tyrannosaurus rex, said Moody Gardens’ Jerri Hamachek. He said each time Moody Gardens has staged a dinosaur exhibit, the species change but the king of the dinosaurs is always on view and always the most popular.
“If you think about one dinosaur, the T. rex comes to mind immediately,” she said.
There are life-size casts of the footprint of an Iguanodon and the jaw of a Ceratosaurus that visitors can touch, near an area where younger children can use tools to dig for “fossils.”
Lisa and Paul Smith traveled to the exhibit from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Their sons Wyatt, 13, and Matthew, 9, were most excited to see the T. rex but also enjoyed learning about the Quetzalcoatlus, the remains of which were discovered in Big Bend National Park in 1971.
“It walked on its wings,” Wyatt said of the flying dinosaur, adding that its wingspan was nearly 40 feet.
The Smiths plan to see “Jurassic World” when they return home from their travels.
David Temple, associate curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, said kids find dinosaurs fascinating due to a “sense of wonder. Everybody loves fairy tales, myths, dragons.” he said. “The thing with dinosaurs is you get all those elements, but it’s real.”
For 10 years, Temple has been working on the museum’s new public viewing areas of paleontology prep labs. The prep station at the Sugar Land location of HMNS is now open. The main campus’ prep lab opens in August. Both labs are located in the museums’ permanent paleontology halls.
The prep labs allow visitors to “get up close and personal” to the process of preparing fossils and specimens that will become part of the museum’s display, Temple said.
They’ll watch skilled volunteers clean and sort specimens. They’ll also watch the steps of scanning, molding, casting, 3-D printing and scientific illustration.
“You see discovery going on right in front of you,” Temple said. “You’re able to be a part of that.”
Temple said the Sugar Land experience is “more intimate” because the station is on full view, allowing guests to ask questions about what they’re seeing. The main campus’ prep lab is behind a glass partition; an intercom allows communication with the volunteers. For young scientists, the Sugar Land location also has a permanent dig pit filled with dinosaur specimens.
For more “hands-on science,” Temple suggests some summer road-trip itineraries for “Jurassic Park” fans.
At Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose, you can wade through shallow waters in the bed of the Paluxy River to step in the tracks of dinosaurs that once roamed the area. The indentations in the ground “are very obviously dinosaur tracks,” Temple said.
The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Memorial Museum boasts several paleontologic treasures, including the massive skeleton of a Quetzalcoatlus.
And in Dallas, at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science’s permanent dinosaur hall, the “Ultimate Dinosaurs” exhibit opens this weekend. A cousin to the T. rex, the Giganotosaurus is on view. There’s also an augmented-reality game so kids can feel what it’s like to move in the flesh of a dino. But for the ultimate night at the museum, the Perot has planned dinothemed sleepovers on July 13 and Aug. 31.