Dinosaur Discovery Museum

We forgot to mention our visit to the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Fruita yesterday.  It's a great little museum with information on dinosaurs that roamed this area millions of years ago.  We've been to a few dino sites in our travels before, but this is the first one that has both real bones, casts of bones, assembled skeletons and motorized, lifelike dinosaurs.  It also has a model of the Fruitadens, the smallest dinosaur found in the Fruita area.

Kids can push a button to bring some of the dinosaurs to life.  The scariest is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, who roars and moves his head around, opening his mouth wide to show just how dangerous this dinosaur must have been.  There was also a dinosaur, that when you pushed the button, he would take a drink of water, move his head around, and spit water on unsuspecting people walking by.  The grossest one was a lifelike dinosaur with the head of another dinosaur in its mouth, and the rest of the dead dinosaur on the ground below.  Yuck. 

We saw two real dinosaur femur bones on display, and one had teeth marks on it showing where it was bitten into by another dinosaur.  They also had some casts of dinosaur footprints that you could touch, as well as some fish fossils that were pretty interesting.

Jeff, Henry and Ruth had fun standing in an earthquake simulator that showed how the earth's surface cracks and lets you feel the shaking sensation.

We bought a few arrowheads and polished rock slices in the nice little gift shop.