Discover the Dinosaurs review: great times for kids for 2+ hours

Discover the Dinosaurs is a traveling exhibit that features dinosaur attractions of a wide variety.  The entire exhibition is broken up into two distinct areas. The exhibit area features the moving, roaring dinosaurs that will captivate your child’s imagination.  The other areas like the Dino Dig, Dino Theater, Dino Den, Dinosaur Rides, inflatables, gem & fossil panning, mini golf and gift shop make up the other half.  Our review of Discover the Dinosaurs says that it’s a great time for kids, but parents need to be aware of a couple things in order to really appreciate the event.

The first 40% of the exhibition is what you go to the event for.  Big, in some cases life size dinosaurs that move, roar and provide a great scale as to how massive they really were.  Our 4 year old was a little scared at first, but after seeing the first couple of them he realized that they weren’t real and had a blast.

He knows dozens of dinosaurs by name and can tell us what each one of them at home.  At Discover the Dinosaurs he was asking questions about them and running from all of them trying to figure out which one he like the best.

Once you make your way through the dinosaur exhibit you’ll find a very large gift shop that is more than willing to sell you all manner of dinosaur stuff.  Dino toys, models, books, more dino models and socks.  Socks you say, why would they sell socks?

The other 60% of the exhibition is made up of dinosaur inflatables.  It’s like the bounce house that you go to with your kids except these are all dinosaur themed.  Our kids loved these.  At first I thought they were out of place.   However, Discover the Dinosaurs is a place for kids to learn and have fun.  The dino inflatables are the fun part for them to jump around.

There are big inflatables for bigger kids and a series of smaller ones for younger kids.  Also in this area was the face painting, gem & fossil panning, mini golf and dinosaur rides.  The dinosaur rides sound cheesy, but our 4YO had a great time riding the triceratops and grinned from ear to ear the entire time.

Come for the dinosaurs, stay for the inflatable’s and then see the dinosaurs again is one way to think of Discover the Dinosaurs.  If you walk through the dinosaur exhibit area once, play in the inflatable area and then leave you won’t get your monies worth.

The key to doing this is to arrive on the first day Discover the Dinosaurs is in town, go early or go late.  If you go around lunch it’ll be very crowded, you’ll be waiting for a long time on all exhibits and be quite frustrated.  We arrived ten minutes after they opened on their second day in town and easily spent almost three hours having fun.

However, by the time we left it was packed and there was a line at least 75 people deep for most exhibits.  The exception to this was the dinosaur area.  People tend to walk through that quickly and then get stuck in the funnel at the end.  If you shake up your visit to discover the Dinosaurs you’ll have a better time.   The event is squarely aimed at children, which is evident in their pricing, adults $18, children 2-12 $22, but you can find discount codes on their website or in local media.