Prehistoric Playground : Exhibit Lets School Kids Go Snout to Nose With Lifelike Dinosaurs

Sean Carson swept aside the wood chips covering the buried fossils, working as a paleontologist would for his first glimpse of a dinosaur.

“It’s footprints!” he exclaimed, as a hooked toe and claw emerged.

Carson was among about 40 kindergartners from the St. Jeanne de Lestonnac School in Tustin who visited the one-day-only preview of a new life-size exhibit of baby dinosaurs manufactured by Dinamation International Corp. of Irvine. The exhibit makes its national debut at the Houston Zoo this month.

The exhibit, geared to children ages 3 to 8 and on display at Dinamation’s plant in Tustin, features 17 life-size robotic dinosaurs, including a 15-foot-tall parasaurolophus, who bellows like a fog horn and guards her nest of newly hatched chicks.

Children can make dinosaur tracks in the sand, sculpt animals from modeling clay and piece together dinosaur puzzles in the hands-on exhibit, Dinamation spokeswoman Wendy Keiper said.

At the sandstorm display, 6-year-old Brianna Graves fanned a pile of Styrofoam pellets over dinosaur remains and learned how bones became covered with layers of dust.

“I never knew they had such things as sandstorms,” she said.

After a few minutes with the whirling pellets, she raced to the tyrannosaurus rex display. “He’s cool. He’s the boss of it,” she said, pointing to the king of the dinosaurs, who roared and played with a fat green triceratops.

While some children flitted from critter to critter, others were mesmerized by the modeling clay they used to shape dinosaur bones and nests full of eggs. Others rubbed etchings of dinosaurs from metal plates, practicing a skill that paleontologists use in the field in taking images of fossils and skin imprints.

At the front of the display, children played with a dinosaur who was cut in half, revealing his mechanical innards. By moving a lever one way, the dinosaur moved his mouth; with another flick of the lever, he moved his arms.

“He said something!” 4-year-old Gus Ellis whispered as he jerked the mouth of the dinosaur open and closed.

The exhibit demonstrates the family life of young dinosaurs, and comes with pasteboard stories parents can use to explain the behavior of the ancient reptiles in simple terms.

The ideas are simple, but part of the purpose is to involve parents in their children’s learning, paleontologist George Callison said.

One display features a huge, winged dinosaur-dad feeding fish to his hungry chicks.

Another shows a baby apatosaurus playing with a tree full of winged, pointy-nosed dinosaurs, and a spiked-back giant lizard. The story says that the young dinosaurs, at first frightened of each other, are now friends.

And one display reminds children that although the tyrannosaurus rex once ruled Earth, the humble, tiny turtles that lived alongside him are the ones that survived the ravages of geologic time.

Dinamation began manufacturing the large, scientifically accurate beasts in 1983 to increase interest in science among schoolchildren while providing a fun introduction to paleontology, Keiper said. “We’re trying to add scientists to the list of heroes for children,” she said.

The company usually makes adult-sized dinosaurs and rents them to zoos, museums and aquariums, Keiper said.

The Prehistoric Playground is the first time Dinamation has manufactured an entire exhibit, including educational stories. The company isn’t planning to exhibit the display in Orange County because there are no appropriate museums for it here, Keiper said.

But on Tuesday, parents were happy their kids had the chance to see the creatures.