Late Night With Rex

Last night I took all four kids to the Lehi Museum of Ancient Life to celebrate Caleb's birthday.  Every time we go to Manti he asks "When can we go to the bigger, better dinosaur park?"  So, I caved & we went!  I had been looking at their website & realized that Friday night they were holding their once a month Late Night With Rex.  It's more money ($110.00 for all five of us) but it was totally money well spent!

We arrived at about 5:30 pm & it didn't start until 6 pm.  So, we checked in & then went straight to the gift shop!  Good thing we did too because we never had another chance to get in there before they closed!

There were about 20 of us there for the late night so they divided us up into two groups.  We ended up with another mom & her 7 yo & two middle school aged girls.  We had two guides (both girls) that were a lot of fun & very knowledgeable about everything we were seeing and doing!
They have over 60 complete dinosaur skeletons at this dinosaur museum!  There are some you can touch & some to just look at.  They have some on loan from other places and some that are there all the time.  I thought this guy just inside the entrance was pretty cool.  He reminded me of our TJ :)

 The first thing we did in our group was go on a tour of the entire museum.  This museum is huge!  We spent about an hour on our tour & we weren't too pokie at any point in time!  This showed the kids what the sea floor would have been like.

Lots of cool trilobytes!

Any guesses on what this is?  I wouldn't have ever guessed it if they hadn't told me!

 It's fossilized squid!

They had recreated different things.  This showed the ocean life.  I was impressed with how well their recreations were done!

And this my friends, is exactly why I don't like to get in deep water that I can't see the bottom of!  I know it's a mostly irrational fear, but hey, I don't care to take my chances!

Caleb thought this spiny guy was cool.  He isn't a dinosaur but what we had in the period before the dinosaurs.

Caleb thought he was being tricky by making it look like he was holding up this dinosaur skeleton!

This stegosaurus was pretty cool.  They had some dinosaur era crocs laid out there like they were eating the stegosaurus.

The pelvis bone of a brontosaurs.  This thing was massive!

We walked under the Brontosaurus and weren't even close to being able to touch the rib cage!

We went into an area of the museum where you can see/learn about erosion.  The kids liked playing in this area.  They were making little islands & putting plastic dinosaurs on them so they were trapped on the island!

Caleb thought it was pretty cool he could actually sit on this dinosaur!

Caleb's favorite!  A T Rex!

Another T Rex

This was one of the fossils they had out that the kids could touch.

A massive sea turtle

A wooly mammoth.  Notice the human skeletons with the spears killing the mammoth?  I thought that was pretty cool.  If you look close you can see the mammoth kneeling on a human or two & crushing them to death!

After our tour we went into the palentology lab.  The kids got to take a fish fossil & use dental tools on it to carve around the fossil or put their name/date in it or whatever.  B was not a fan of the noise or the safety goggles!

We also got to make a plastic of paris cast.  The boys did a T Rex tooth, Sam did a raptor claw & B did a triolobyte.

Next up we made petroglyphs with a small nail & some tile like pieces.  Caleb insisted I draw a T Rex on his for him.

After our petroglyphs we each got a wooden triceretops puzzle to put together.  Yes, it was one of those 3-D puzzles!  Even B got her own puzzle.  She was more interested in coloring on a tile & pushing the stroller around though!

See what I mean about pushing the stroller?  Every time I picked up my camera or phone out of my purse she would get mad at me & make me put it back in my purse so she could push it around the room!

Caleb finished putting together his 3-D puzzle with the help of one of our nice guides.

After we finished up in the lab we had about ten minutes until we started our scavenger hunt.  So, we went into the area of the museum that is like a big sandbox where the kids got to use paintbrushes to uncover dinosaur fossils.

After we uncovered some dinosaur bones in the sand we went on our scavenger hunt.  I said this museum was huge.  I didn't realize how huge it was until we were running from one end of it to the other and back in a race against the other team!  At the end of the scavenger hunt the kids each got one of those styrofoam flyers that was shaped like a dinosaur.  AND, since our group finished first we got to launch them off the second floor of the museum into the giant brontosaurus while we waited for the other group to catch up!

After our scavenger hunt we got to watch a 3 D movie on a mammoth screen (like an IMAX screen).  Everyone voted on what movie they wanted to watch.  We ended up watching Titans of the Ice Age which was about mammoths.  It was kinda cool but as the older kids put it, it was "too educational mom."  They had wanted to see the Dinosaurs Alive movie but we got out voted so, next time!

We didn't leave the museum until 10:30 pm!  When we left I asked the kids if they had $110.00 worth of fun and got a resounding "YES!"  Nash even said, "I know where I want to go for my birthday next year mom!"  And, he also informed me that now he wants to be a paleontologist too.  (When we were on the tour we got to see the spot where the actual paleontologists work on uncovering dinosaur bones during the day.  They have one of those labs at the Ogden Dinosaur Park too and the paleontologist there sat & talked with my boys for a good 45 minutes last time we went.)  So, I'd say that all in all the evening was a huge success!