Walking with dinosaurs

By Bobby Ellis
bobby.ellis@education.ky.gov

If you’ve ever watched “Jurassic Park” and thought that a Tyrannosaurus rex would be fun to ride on or that you might actually want to meet a 6-foot tall carnivorous lizard, then Jurassic Quest is the place for you. 

Over the course of three days, dinosaurs of all kinds, shapes and sizes took over the Kentucky Convention Center during Jurassic Quest, a traveling, interactive event that takes visitors through the Triassic and Cretaceous periods with the help of animatronics and life-like dino suits worn by workers. 

Along with getting to tour a prehistoric forest, visitors could dig for fossils in excavation pits, get their faces painted and break apart “dinosaur eggs” made from clay. On the outside of the event hall was a table covered with actual fossils for people to look at. 

“That’s a T. rex tooth!” shouted Easton Jones of Tyner, as he pointed out a sharp fossil on the table. “Oh, I bet that’s a T. rex footprint!” 

“It’s pretty cool, especially for the kids,” said Phillip Overall, as his son Parker waited to dig in one of the fossil pits. “They see those big dinosaurs and you just watch their eyes get wide like ‘Whoa, it’s a dinosaur!'”