DinoDig® transports guests more than 100 million years back through time to the Cretaceous Period. A fourteen-foot tall Acrocanthosaurus keeps a watchful eye over the Museum's main entrance as a six-foot tall Tenontosaurus dossi drinks from a flowing stream in the courtyard. Towering rocks border the environment.
Guests to the Museum can dig for dinosaurs in the unique surroundings of DinoDig®. The first exhibit of its size and scope in the world, DinoDig® combines life-sized representations of dinosaurs with a large outdoor discovery area where guests can become amateur paleontologists and dig for dinosaur bones. DinoDig® includes several dig areas to provide different levels of challenge to guests. Bones in the dig sites range in size from a four-inch vertebra of a Tenontosaurus dossi to a six-foot leg bone of a large sauropod.
The idea for DinoDig® began in 1988 when Museum staff unearthed a Tenontosaurus dossi specimen near Weatherford, Texas. The twenty-foot long skeleton is now on permanent exhibit in the Museum's Lone Star Dinosaurs gallery.
Visual highlights of DinoDig® are the life-sized representations of two local dinosaur species. Tenontosaurus dossi was a herbivore that grew to be six-feet tall, twenty-feet long, and weighed about one ton.
Guests can see the Tenontosaurus dossi skeleton from Weatherford inside the Museum, then, in DinoDig®, see what the creature looked like when it was alive 113 million years ago. Guests can also experience the initial discovery of the Tenontosaurus dossi in DinoDig®, since one of the dig sites contains casts of the tail, vertebrae, and skull of the actual dinosaur.
To make DinoDig® scientifically correct, Museum staff members conferred with several other dinosaur experts. Principal advisor was Dr. Louis Jacobs, Director of the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at Southern Methodist University and author of the book Lone Star Dinosaurs.
Dr. Jacobs and his staff at the Shuler Museum are currently working in collaboration with the Museum on several dinosaur finds, including the 113 million year old Hobson Theropod specimen in Parker County. After the bones are extracted from the rock, cleaned, and studied at SMU, the articulated skeleton will be returned to the Museum for exhibition.
Take a look at what's being unearthed in DinoDig® with Live Cam.
