DINO FAMILY DAY FESTIVAL
WHEN: Saturday, April 27 – 10 AM – 3 PM
WHERE: Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Ave., Morristown
ADMISSION: All Dino Day activities and programs are included with museum admission: $7/child; $10/adult.
For more information, call 973.971.3700, or visit www.morrismuseum.org.
Live Performance in the Bickford Theater at 11:00 AM
Enjoy a “Dino Dance Party” presented by Field Station Dinosaurs.
Activities all day:
- Play Feed the T-Rex
- Climb inside a model of a dinosaur nest
- Touch an authentic hadrosaur egg
- Reconstruct a dinosaur skeleton
- Create a dinosaur puppet to take home
- Examine real amber in the Fossil Lab
- Check out dinosaur dung
- Follow dinosaur footprints throughout the exhibition
- Create your own fossil
- Hunt for Fossils in a dig pit
- Make a Dino Magnet
About Digging Dinosaurs Gallery at the Morris Museum
In the Digging Dinosaurs gallery, visitors will be able to touch a real dinosaur egg, follow dinosaur tracks, make a dinosaur track rubbing, and hear a simulated sound of a honking hadrosaur. Using various clues and fossils, such as footprints, fossilized eggs, and dinosaur teeth, they can become acquainted with the creatures that lived in New Jersey during the Age of the Dinosaurs.
On entering the gallery, viewers will see Karen Carr’s 30-foot mural, which depicts three hadrosaurs with a nest full of eggs. Both the New Jersey Cretaceous environment and the hadrosaurs’ appearance have been recreated from fossil evidence. The mural includes a series of pop-out cases—containing petrified wood, fossilized pine cone, amber with insects, and hadrosaur skin impressions—which demonstrate how artists and scientists collaborated to interpret what the dinosaurs and their environment might have looked like during the Cretaceous period.
Hands-on interactive stations throughout the gallery encourage visitors to learn about the lives of dinosaurs, and characteristics such as their claw movements and crest trumpeting for communication. The exhibition focuses on dinosaur themes: Nesting and Growth, Tracks and Movement, Paleo-environmental Reconstruction (using paleontology to reconstruct the landscape of a specific time and place), Predator and Prey and What’s for Dinner. In the laboratory area, children and families will have the opportunity to examine fossils and other specimens, using tools such as electric magnifiers and magnifying glasses.
About the Morris Museum
The Morris Museum is an award-winning, community-based arts and cultural institution which serves the public through the presentation of high caliber permanent and changing exhibitions in the arts, sciences and humanities. The Museum also offers educational programs, family events, and is home to the Bickford Theatre and its wide range of performing arts offerings. Continuously serving the public since 1913, the Morris Museum has been designated a Major Arts Institution and has received the New Jersey State Council on the Arts’ Citation of Excellence, among other awards. In 2013, the museum is celebrating its Centennial Anniversary. These programs are made possible, in part, by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; the F.M. Kirby Foundation and the New Jersey Cultural Trust.
The Museum is located at 6 Normandy Heights Road (at the corner of Columbia Turnpike) in Morristown, NJ, and is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 11 AM to 5 PM; Thursday, 11 AM to 8 PM; and Sunday, 1-5 PM. Admission to the museum is $10 for adults and $7 for children, students and senior citizens. Admission is always free for museum members and is free to the public every Thursday between 5 and 8 PM.
