Taking the Kids: Five places to get up close and personal to dinosaurs
Performance artists and puppeteers make a giant T. Rex and Triceratops come to life during "Dino Encounters" and you can watch scientists at work at the museum's Dino Lab.
-- Meet Sue, the largest, best preserved and most complete T. Rex fossil ever found at the Field Museum (www.fieldmuseum.org). She's 42-feet-long and 13-feet tall! Check out her 600-pound skull. Spend the night "Dozin' with the Dinos," an interactive experience complete with special family workshops; travel across the globe with a Field Museum team as they search for what life was like before dinosaurs in the exhibit "Before the Dinosaurs: Tracking the Reptiles of Pangaea," which opened last winter.
-- The Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University (www.museumoftherockies.org) is just 90 minutes from Yellowstone in Bozeman. Mont., and is famous for its extensive collection of dinosaur fossils -- the largest T. Rex collection anywhere -- and the paleontology work of Dr. Jack Horner, known for his discovery of the first dinosaur eggs in the western hemisphere. (Horner was the inspiration for the character Dr. Alan Grant in the "Jurassic Park" movies.) Here you can see fossilized dinosaur eggs and nests, and watch as scientists prepare fossils from the field -- the painstaking process of removing them from the rock in which they're encased.
-- Jane, the most complete juvenile T. Rex, and Homer, the most complete adolescent Triceratops, rule at the Burpee Museum of Natural History (www.burpee.org) about an hour northwest of Chicago in Rockford, Ill. Paleontologists don't really know whether Jane or Homer were male or female. The 21-foot skeleton of Jane, the centerpiece of the exhibit "Jane: Diary of a Dinosaur," was named for a major benefactor of the museum and Homer by Helmuth Redschlag, who apparently loves "The Simpsons" and discovered the cache of juvenile Triceratops bones in Southeast Montana.
Whether you are heading to a huge, world-class museum or a smaller regional one to learn more about dinosaurs, encourage the kids to lead the way. Take a virtual tour of the museum's dinosaur exhibits before you go and decide what you want to see first. Encourage each of the kids to find one weird and fun fact about dinos to tell you when you're there. Download an app for the exhibit, if there is one.
Most important, leave when the kids have had enough. Don't be discouraged or disappointed if you can't see everything or can't spend as much time as you'd like. The dinos aren't going anywhere. They'll be waiting for you next time.
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Eileen's newest Kids City Guide, The Kid's Guide to Boston, has just been published and is available on line and at major booksellers along with the others in the series. Visit www.takingthekids.com or engage with Eileen @TakingtheKids on Twitter and Facebook.
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