Traveling Through Time: The Best Museums to Visit for Dinosaur Enthusiasts
The earliest dinosaurs began to inhabit the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. To date, about 700 different kinds of dinosaurs have been named, and even more are being discovered.
If you are a dino fanatic and would love to travel back in time to see feathered, armored, or horned dinosaurs up close, then this article is for you. There are quite a few museums around the globe that safely bring humans face-to-face with dinosaurs and their skeletons.
While different and ancient dinosaurs await your visit, you can participate in a modern-day digital museum adventure that guarantees an immersive experience and visitors’ interactions.
Besides interactive showings and virtual reality tours, there are museums that also offer online experiences, from which you can view exhibits remotely, engage in live events, or play online roulette to increase your experience excitement. With every spin and play, you enjoy the perfect thrill of arts and culture – the fusion of art, culture, and gaming through digital technology.
Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin)
The Natural History Museum in Berlin is home to a site-specific piece largely made out of bones excavated in Tanzania throughout the 20th century. The piece features a variety of species for visitors to see.
The most mind-blowing species is the 41-footer and 5-inch Brachiosaurus, the world’s tallest dinosaur displayed in a museum. This Guinness World Record holder will leave you in awe as it fills the entire first gallery.
The museum also features the most important Archaeopteryx fossil in the world. This fossil provides real-time evidence of the evolutionary birdlike link between dinosaurs and birds.
Field Museum (Chicago)
The centrepiece of the museum’s Evolving Planet exhibition is a display spanning 4 billion years of Earth’s history, including dinosaurs that roamed parts of Madagascar and Antarctica.
The highlight of the exhibition is the entrance featuring the world’s largest and most popular dinosaur, Sue, one of the largest Tyrannosaurus discoveries in the world.
Sue welcomes visitors to the Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She’s one of a kind. Her original skull, which weighed 600 pounds and had 58 teeth, was recently displayed on the museum’s balcony level. She is one of the museum’s most famous dinosaur exhibits.
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science (Brussels)
As the largest Dinosaur gallery in the world, this museum has a collection of fossils and casts of most of the dinosaurs ever known. The main displays include 30 Iguanodons, the second dinosaur named in the 1800s.
The fossils and bones come in all shapes and sizes, including one specific kind with a curious spike that the earliest paleontologists often presumed to be a horn. The gallery’s interactive displays also explain fossilization processes, dinosaur digs, and other related topics.
National Dinosaur Museum (Canberra, Australia)
This gallery showcases Australia’s prehistoric era, holding the country’s most extensive dinosaur fossil collection.
Walking along the aisles, one can spot fossils, bones, and interesting footprints belonging to all sorts of creatures and beasts. The museum features a dinosaur garden with imposing sculptures of these prehistoric animals. There are also some animatronics inside the displays that add a bit of dinosaur Spielberg magic to the overall exhibit.
Their added activities, such as adult digs, children’s learning events, and weekend tours, attract more than 200,000 people annually, making it one of the biggest attractions in the area.
Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology (Alberta, Canada)
Over 130 thousand specimens are exhibited in this paleontological center, including the original “Black Beauty” Tyrannosaurus skeleton, which is distinctly dark in appearance. The exhibit has an imitation of the Raptors shedding bones of 1884, which were discovered by Joseph Tyrell, a pioneer of Canada.
The museum also exhibits reconstructed saber-tooths attacking mammoths and a living garden modeling life in the Cretaceous using southern Alberta fossils.
Visitors have a chance to see the paleontologists at work in the preparation lab and find out how they prepare fossilized bones like the Ankylosaur found in a Canadian mine.
Wyoming Dinosaur Center (Wyoming)
The star of this museum is a 106-foot-long Supersaurus. The museum has acquired one of the largest archeopteryx in the world (but still less than the one in Berlin) and showcases skeletons of Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Velociraptor, among others, in different poses.
One of the museum’s highlights is the opportunity to talk to professional paleontologists who inspired Dr. Alan Grant’s character in Jurassic Park.
People of all ages are invited to “dig for a day” by signing up for guided trips to one of the world’s most productive bone fields.
Zigong Dinosaur Museum (Zigong, China)
Another majestic Jurassic Fossil Museum, the Dinosaur Museum in Zigong, occupies the Dashanpu fossil site at the top of the hill. It provides visitors with a real sight of an active excavation site.
This is among the world’s top five attractions, with 18 skeletons of the 200 individuals exhumed from the yard being an exhibit. They include prints, skin fossils, and other strange things.
These fossils are the most recognized among all dinosaur communities, and almost 7 million visitors from China come annually to see them.
Jurassic Land (Istanbul)
Set up in 2011, Jurassic Land lets you get as close as possible to the raptors. Half educational and half entertainment, the 10,000 sq. m. museum features real skeletons with moving animatronic imitations of the dinosaurs, including a “veterinarian” helping an injured Stegosaurus and incubators for the dinosaur eggs.
The center of the museum offers a wide and lively learning place for kids. However, some museum-goers might prefer something other than the depictions of a Spinosaurus and a Triceratops, which leaves much to be desired regarding accuracy.
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