Norwalk’s Stepping Stones Museum’s newest exhibit, Big Adventures: Dinosaurs, gives children a chance to learn about paleontology through hands on learning and playing. The exhibit opened on July 27th, and because of how enthusiastically the public has responded thus far, it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
We were going to move onto our next traveling exhibit at the beginning of 2020, but right now we’re going to hold off on that because we’re seeing a great response to this exhibit already,” said director of public affairs Robert Townes. “We just want to keep it here because we want to be responsive to the desires and interests of our visitors and our members, and the children are reacting really well to the exhibit.”
The exhibit relies on the use of imagination by presenting a new scenario for children to role play while they learn about the Connecticut region’s past and are encouraged to think about things happening in the present. Kids will get to experience traveling in a time machine back 190 million years into the past to see a full sized “living” Dilophosaurus, the official state dinosaur of Connecticut. Kids then get the chance to zoom back to 2019 to a paleontologist’s laboratory, enabling them to discover the clues dinosaurs left behind, such as fossil bones and footprints.
“We joke around here and say ‘kids dig dinosaurs’ and in a couple of weeks here, we are going to make a big addition to the exhibit,” Townes said. “We’re getting an animatronic 9-foot dinosaur that’s going to be roaming through the exhibit space here at the museum.”
For more information about Big Adventures: Dinosaurs Exhibit, visit the Stepping Stones Museum website.
Main Image: A junior paleontologist works to uncover a dinosaur fossil in the PaleoLab portion of the Big Adventures: Dinosaurs exhibit at Stepping Stones Museum.
Image credit: Jim Russek/ Stepping Stones
