Visitors are invited to discover Plants in the Age of Dinosaurs—a self-guided exhibition featuring plants with roots that go back to prehistoric times. There is also a brand-new dinosaur exhibition in the Garden Railway, Garden Railway: Dinos! Plus, there will be a pop-up paleontologist’s cottage featuring hands-on “dig stations,” special family-friendly programming including Fossil Fridays, dino story time, and much more!

If you were to travel back in time to the Mesozoic Era, which lasted from approximately 252 million years ago to 66 million years ago, you would find a world much different than our own. Not only was it a time of great geologic and biological transition, but the world had some of the hottest temperatures ever known. As the climate changed, plants changed, too! Flowering plants appeared and led the way to an era that supported greater numbers and variety of dinosaurs than any other. Meat-eating animals like the Tyrannosaurus rex got their energy by eating plant-eating dinosaurs like the Triceratops, which got their energy by eating plants and the plants got their energy from sunlight! Without these plants, the food chain would have been incomplete.