Dinosaurs Roam Alberta’s Jurassic Forest

As much as I love spotting dinosaurs along the road and in "prehistoric parks," I have to admit that most of them look terrible. Not only are they often misshapen and woefully out of date, but many have been in a state of disrepair for years. It seems that many roadside dinosaurs are the products of an earlier wave of dinomania that have been left to rot, but now some people are creating the next generation of dinosaur parks.

Next month will see the opening of the Jurassic Forest dinosaur park in Gibbons, Alberta, Canada. It will open with about 40 dinosaurs—some of which were recently flown in by helicopter—but they are not going to be immobile statues. Instead, following the continuing dino-motion trend, the dinosaurs will be animatronic robots that will have the usual behavioral repertoire of blinking, growling, and waggling their appendages for visitors. Photos from early news reports show that the park will be home to at least two robotic Parasaurolophus, but a list of the full dinosaur menagerie has yet to be released.

More information about the park will be made available at its website, JurassicForest.com

Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.