Hands-on dinosaur exhibit opens at Lake County’s Dunn Museum; ‘A learning experience for everyone’

The Lake County Bess Bower Dunn Museum has opened an exhibit that fuels the ongoing curiosity about dinosaurs by letting visitors touch and feel what their bones were really like.

The interactive displays are specially cast fiberglass molds copying the textures of different fossils, including six life-size skeletons.

The exhibit, Dinosaur Fossils Exposed, was put together by the Arkansas Discovery Network, a partnership that includes the Dunn Museum. The museum’s team was looking for a temporary display that was educational, hands-on and engaging for all ages.

“People learn and take in information in a variety of ways,” Nan Buckardt, the museum’s director of education, said. “One is not inherently better than other. Some people are skilled at processing visual information, others auditory, and still others are very experiential.

“This exhibit provides all three major formats, which should make this a learning experience for everyone,” she said. “In addition, because the exhibit provides a hands-on experience, non-readers can enhance their understanding of dinosaurs through the experience.”

The molds include six full-size dinosaur molds, including a triceratops, velociraptor, and Tyrannosaurus rex; as well as fossil molds of skulls, arms, legs, eggs, footprints and a six-foot Apatosaurus femur.

“Visitors will be able to touch a life-size dinosaur while reading facts about the animals,” Steve Furnett, the museum’s exhibitions and collections manager, said. “There are also plenty of opportunities for photographs. These molds are made of cast fiberglass and carved foam based on specimens that have been found.”

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Creatures with local and state ties — such as the Dryptosaurus, a mastodon bone discovered in Ingleside and the Tully Monster — are also featured as part of the museum’s holdings.

The Dryptosaurus is the museum’s “official greeter,” a unique and permanent attraction, at the entrance.

“This replica is a work of art, and contribution to science,” Nicole Stocker, the museum’s education manager, said. “A small Tyrannosaur, it’s believed to have roamed Lake County approximately 67 million years ago … (and was) a 20-foot-long, bipedal, ground dweller and carnivore.”

Stocker also said that Dunn Museum exhibit designers had commissioned Chicago paleoartist Tyler Keillor to build the animal, complete with proto-feathers, razor-sharp teeth and large eight-inch clawed talons. A paleontologist from Yale University was also part of the process, which took more than a year from concept to installation.

The mastodon bone, found while dredging a canal in 1925, has its own story.

Herman Kaping retrieved some bones of a mastodon in his Ingleside bog. The skull was hoisted several times, but slipped back into the mud. The glass-encased bone was a centerpiece of the original Lake County History Museum, the Dunn Museum’s forerunner, in Wadsworth.

The Tully Monster is named after Francis Tully, who discovered the first fossils in 1958.

A slender, soft-bodied sea creature with a long and narrow snout, their sensory organs were set away from the body on stalks. Mazon Creek in central Illinois is the only place in the world where it has been found. The mystery remains as to how it became extinct.

“Also, there is no agreement (among scientists) if it even has any living relatives,” Buckardt said.

The exhibition runs through Jan. 15. Museum hours and the admission process are listed at the DunnMuseum.org. The museum is located at 1899 W. Winchester Road in Libertyville.