2006 – Evolving Planet Opens at Chicago’s Field Museum
On this day in dinosaurs, the Field Museum of Natural History opened one of the most comprehensive exhibits on evolutionary history. Evolving Planet takes visitors on a 3.5 billion year journey from the earliest lifeforms to our present day. Along the way, visitors meet a bewildering number of organisms and pass through the five major mass extinction events, giving pause to consider the current sixth great extinction and what we’re doing to promote it.
Evolving Planet is the latest in a long line of fossil exhibits from the Field Museum, but its current form is so comprehensive and exciting that it’s hard to imagine that it will not persist for generations.
The undisputed stars of the show reside in the Genius Hall of Dinosaurs. Famous skeletons of favorites like Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Daspletosaurus, and many others create a vivid visual representation of Mesozoic wildlife.
The drama unfolds beneath Charles R. Knight’s famous sequence of murals depicting the fossil animals as they would have appeared in the flesh. Evolving Planet holds many of Knight’s most famous murals, including the legendary T. rex vs. Triceratops standoff.
Visitors can touch fossil bones, recreate the trumpeting sounds made by Parasaurolophus, and take lots of pictures–and we want you to share those photos of Evolving Planet with us on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #TDIDinos.
2003 – Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis appears on Windows
Also, on this day in dinosaurs, a computer game was released that allowed users to build their own dinosaur theme parks.
Operation Genesis challenged gamers to raise dinosaurs and keep park visitors safe. With 25 dinosaurs in the gameplay and a variety of missions to complete, the game became one of the most beloved of the franchise by its devotees.
Tomorrow, we’ll begin a series of big birthdays in the dinosaur world. Until then, roar at us on Facebook and Twitter!