By Clarisse Kim

Visitors to the California Academy of Sciences are familiar with the towering Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton greeting guests at the main entrance. Now, that T. rex has new dinosaur friends in the outdoor gardens.

The era of dinosaurs has come to life at the Academy in the form of moving, roaring, true-to-size animatronics.

Dino Days, the Academy’s newest exhibit, is on display until Sept. 1. Featuring 13 dinosaur animatronics, a fossil dig pit and a climbable photo-op, Dino Days brings the prehistoric world to life. The exhibit is also accompanied with a variety of dino-themed programming, from daily trivia to puppet shows to an after-hours family DinoNight! event.

Feathered wings flap and armored tails sway beside a captivated crowd. A juvenile Brachiosaurus swings its head toward a family and their eager cameras.

“Our main intent was to bring the excitement and science of these dinosaurs to San Francisco and our guests,” said Aaron Smith, director of exhibitions. “You can really get a sense of what these dinosaurs may have looked like in prehistoric times. It’s pretty unique to see the size, the scale, and hear the sounds that these dinosaurs could have made.”

Dino Days first came to the Academy in 2019, where the exhibitions team worked with animatronics company Billings Productions to curate around seven dinosaur animatronics. The dinos were displayed in one of their two gardens.

“This year, the exhibit’s twice as big,” Smith said. “We wanted to build on the excitement that was generated in the first iteration.”

Now, the animatronics have taken over both of the Academy’s outdoor gardens. Guests can expect to see some familiar dinosaur faces – the T. rex and nest of baby Parasaurolophi being two of the most notable returnees.

“We revisited all the old interpretive panels and graphics to see which dinos we wanted to include, and we looked into current research to keep our information updated,” Dana Goldberg, senior exhibit content developer, said. “We wanted to make sure we had a mix of new and returnee animatronics.”

This year’s Dino Days also features a handful of new species ranging in ages, shapes and regions.

“During the first time Dino Days was at the Academy, they primarily focused on dinosaurs from one era and region, like the western part of North America in the Cretacious Period.” Goldberg said. “We decided to be a little looser this time around and represent different parts of the world. But our primary focus was getting a good variety of sizes and types of dinosaurs in each garden, like whether they were a carnivore or a herbivore, juvenile or adult.”

Both Goldberg and Smith agree: Their favorite animatronic is the Suchomimus, which poses with a fish in its mouth. The best part? It’s drooling for its dinner.

“This particular animatronic has a water feature built into it, so when it’s moving, it looks like the dinosaur is salivating,” Smith said. “It’s one of the really fun animatronics.”

Another one of Smith’s favorites is the Pachyrhinosaurus, the stationary dinosaur that guests can climb for a photo-op.

“It’s really exciting to be able to touch the skin and feel the texture of what a dinosaur might have been like all those years ago,” Smith said. “It’s also fun to have your friends snap a photo of you on top of a dinosaur.”

According to Goldberg, one of the best parts about the animatronic display is that it is as scientifically accurate as possible. Each animatronic is based on the information scientists have gleaned from the fossil record; they’re life size with accurate skin texture and body features. Even the exhibit’s backdrop is scientifically accurate. The plants surrounding each animatronic are close evolutionary descendants from the prehistoric era.

One detail in the exhibit is the addition of feathers. According to Peter Roopnarine, the Academy’s curator of Geology, scientists have understood for a long time that birds are “modern dinosaurs.” There were always suspicions that feathers may have evolved prior to what we call birds.

“In more recent years, we’ve been discovering actual fossils of feathered dinosaurs,” Roopnarine said. “What we’re trying to figure out is how widespread feathers are among dinosaurs – whether some of the dinosaurs that have no traces of feathers in their fossils were feathered or not. It’s one of the big things in modern dinosaur paleontology; feathers are not a bird thing, they’re a dinosaur thing.”

Another aspect that Goldberg and her team also included in the exhibit was each dinosaur’s diet. According to Goldberg, scientists are able to reconstruct what specific species ate by looking at what food was alive during that time period, the shape of the dinosaur’s body and teeth, as well the bones of the animals in their stomach.

“They even look at something called coprolites, which are basically poop fossils,” Goldberg said. “For example, we know from the fossil record that the Cretaceous Period was the first time that flowering plants appeared on Earth. We can hypothesize that herbivores at that time were not just leaves and seeds but also fruits.”

Besides giving guests a glimpse of the dinosaur age, Dino Days can tell us a lot about the future our natural environment is facing. By studying the fossil record, we can understand the Earth’s natural response to rapid climate change that’s similar to current-day global warming.

“We’re very interested in how much you can stress an ecosystem before you begin to see irreversible change,” Roopnarine said. “Eventually, there does come a point where changes come more rapidly, and you begin to see a lot of extinction. What we’re trying to understand from the fossil record is where these transition points are in modern ecosystems.”

Goldberg and her team compared prehistoric climate fluctuations with today’s climate change. According to Goldberg, the exhibit describes how the Earth has always naturally fluctuated in climate, but hardly as intense as climate change caused by human activity.

“One sobering fact I learned from Dr. Roopnarine is that there have been two incredibly large and rapid climate shocks in the past 600 million years,” Goldberg said. “The first was the asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago. The second is the burning of fossil fuels.”

Overall, Smith and Goldberg agree that Dino Days is wonderfully immersive.

“We’ve seen a huge variety of people come to the Academy to enjoy them,” Smith said. “Everyone from families with kids, to adults who are coming for Thursday Night life. People just absolutely love them.”

“It has been so amazing to see so much delight and surprise in the gardens now that they’re full of dinosaurs,” Goldberg said.

In the future, they hope the Academy can display more dino-themed exhibits, specimens and programming.

“I think that there’s kind of a persistent excitement around dinosaurs,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of interest in dinosaurs, the research that we are continuing to do, and the information we’re continuing to learn.”

“We have an excess of five million fossils in our collections that you can see with the naked eye. When you go microscopic, there’s probably an additional six million,” Roopnarine said. “I am always advocating to get more fossils out to the public. We need to talk more about evolutionary biology.”

“I imagine that in the future more dinos will be on the floor,” Goldberg said. “They’ll be roaming the museum one way or another.”

Beyond Bones: What the Fossil Record Can’t Tell Us Yet?

Dinosaur fossils still leave behind some unsolved mysteries – mysteries that the California Academy of Sciences has tackled in its latest Dino Days exhibit.

Featuring moving dinosaur animatronics, Dino Days tries to be as scientifically accurate as possible; each dino is life size, certain dinos are feathered, and surrounding plant life are as close to the prehistoric eras as possible. However, when it comes to the skin color of the dinosaurs, much is left unknown. “Artistic interpretations” have to be made, according to Smith.

“There’s still a lot of questions about what these dinosaurs exactly looked like, like what color they might have been,” Smith said. “There has been some interpretation involved but it’s based on the research that exists.”

Goldberg describes said research:

“Scientists have found that some fossils preserve a pigment-carrying cell called a melanosome. They’re found in bird feathers and in our skin,” she said. “We can kind of extrapolate certain colors from those melanosomes and by comparing them to current-day birds.”

“We actually have cause to believe that dinosaurs had brightly colored skin”

However, according to Goldberg, it’s truly hard to know for certain what color dinosaurs were. The Dino Days animatronics are the Academy’s best scientific guess.

“You’ll find dinosaurs in our gardens right now that are blue and red and green and really vibrant,” Goldberg said. “It’s kind of fun to think these dinosaurs might have really been as psychedelic-colored as certain birds and reptiles are today.”

The California Academy of Sciences is located in Golden Gate Park at 55 Music Concourse Dr. To learn more about the Dino Days exhibit, go to calacademy.org/exhibits/dino-days.