Sue the T.Rex among highlights of dinosaur exhibits opening in Halifax

Is the winter of 2016 going to be the best time of the year for dinosaur lovers here in HRM and across the province? Between two different dino exhibits launching here in the city, you bet jurassic is.

The first folks to offer fossilized fun here in the city are at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, and they hope that their new exhibit, Dinosaur Discoveries, will serve as a nice follow-up for visitors who took in their previous sauropod show.

“Many of your readers will remember last year, having the chance to unearth dinosaurs with Dinosaurs Unearthed, and that was really about showing living, breathing dinosaurs through the robotic models that we had,” says Jeff Gray, curator of visitor experience at the NS Museum of Natural History. “This year, we wanted to follow up all of that with another dinosaur show that really went into more detail, more science, about how dinosaurs lived and how they functioned.”

The Dinosaur Discoveries exhibit, on loan American Museum of Natural History in New York City, focuses on the study of biomechanics, which uses state-of-the-art technology and techniques to determine exactly how dinosaurs would have moved, how they were able to maintain balance, and even what behaviours these mighty beasts might have exhibited — all by studying the fossils and footprints we have at our disposal.

“We can tell, for example, did they live in herds? Did they live singularly? From a trackway, we can begin to piece it together,” says Deborah Skilliter, the curator of geology at the museum. “Looking at an animal’s skeleton — a T. rex, for example — and looking at how muscles would have attached to that skeleton, that can give us information.”

Gray thinks that this Dinosaur Discoveries exhibit will be a nice bookend to a year of dinosaurs that began with their lifelike animatronics show, and was filled out with movies like The Good Dinosaur and Jurassic World bringing dinos back into the public consciousness in a big way.

And even though this exhibit is more about the hard science of dinosaurs, he suspects kids will still have a lot of fun learning about how they really worked (and their parents will, too).

“I think this is kid-friendly in a different way. You can get much closer — there’s a lot of things to touch and explore,” says Gray. “I firmly believe that dinosaurs work for all ages.”

Two-year-old dinosaur fanatic Ethan Fennell is a testament to that. He came to the museum on the same day that the exhibit was open early to media, and Skilliter offered him a personal behind-the-scenes tour. He was thrilled to pet dinosaur skulls and feed a computer animated Apatosaurus using a touch screen. His father Trevor says that Ethan lives, breathes, and eats dinosaurs, and that this kind of exhibit is right up his alley.

“This is more what he would like, I think — looking, touching,” says Fennell. “He loves to know how dinosaurs were, and what they do, what they eat.”

This one exhibit might be enough dinosaur excitement for fossil enthusiasts for one season, but believe it or not, there’s still more. Arguably (and in terms of size, quite literally) the biggest draw for dino-devotees across Nova Scotia this winter is the return of one of the palaeontological world’s most popular Cretaceous celebrities, Sue the T. Rex.

Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found at around 80 per cent, has travelled the world, and has been to Halifax once before. She was the guest of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History then, and this time, she’s hanging around at the Discovery Centre as the centrepiece of their A T. rex Named Sue exhibit.

“When I first found out, I was kind of dancing around everywhere,” says Zabrina Prescott, a visitor experience programmer at the Discovery Centre, who has already got a lot of fun activities planned around their guest of honour. “For Sue, we’re doing five separate themed programs. One involves the probability of being fossilized, and that involves a board game. Another one looks at the puzzle that is palaeontology, and finding a dinosaur and trying to gather all the information together to build the skeleton, based on the information that you have.”

There will also be special day camps involving Sue around March Break, but Prescott doesn’t want to say too much about exactly what they’ll have on offer for that, so as to leave some surprises for the kids.

Suffice it to say, dinosaur lovers in Nova Scotia are pretty blessed this year.

“There’s so much dinosaur to see here in Halifax this winter,” says Gray. “You’re really going to get a lot out of it, and learning more about dinosaurs, from the beauty and grandeur and the scale and size of Sue, to the amount of work that scientists are doing, and the different kinds of science that is happening with dinosaurs.”

“If somebody doesn’t take the opportunity to come down to both museums, you’ll be missing out,” adds Prescott.

Both Dinosaur Discoveries and A T. rex Named Sue are open to the public until May 8, 2016. You can find out more by visiting https://naturalhistory.novascotia.ca/what-see-do/upcoming-exhibits and http://thediscoverycentre.ca/explore/atrexnamedsue.