If you or your kids have always wished that Jurassic Park were real, you’ll want to take note of this upcoming exhibition at the Science Centre Singapore. Dinosaurs | Extinctions | Us is the latest experience at the science museum near Jurong East, bringing together 2 world-renowned exhibitions for the very first time.
Dinosaurs | Extinctions | Us (D.E.U.) is the largest dinosaur exhibition that the Science Centre Singapore has ever seen. It’s jointly organised by the Science Centre and NUS Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (LKCNHM), featuring Dinosaurs of Patagonia, a travelling exhibition curated by Argentinian palaeontology museum Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio, and Six Extinctions, curated by Australia-based studio Godwana Studios. There’s also a special gallery on biodiversity by LKCNHM.
Patagonia, in case you didn’t know, isn’t a country but a tremendously vast region that stretches from the Colorado River to the Southernmost tip of the Americas, spanning areas of both Chile and Argentina. It’s home to some of the richest fossil grounds today, giving rise to the discoveries that shaped this exhibit, and allowing us to step back 200 million years in time.
There’s no doubt that the biggest highlights at Dinosaurs | Extinctions | Us are the dinos, and one of the stars of this show is a life-sized cast of the Patagotitan mayorum, measuring in at 40m long – the first time such a dino has been showcased in Singapore.
The Patagotitan mayorum, FYI, belongs to a group of dinos called titanosaurs – the last-surviving group of long-necked sauropods to exist, and the largest land animals to have ever walked the earth. Each one of these weighed in at approximately 70 tonnes, which in today’s terms is just about as heavy as 10 or more elephants.
Besides this titanosaur, you can look forward to another 12 dino species in this Patagonia exclusive, including teeth-gnashing carnivores from the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic periods.
TIL that the catastrophic destruction of the dinosaurs was just one of 5 mass extinction events that the earth has survived, and the most recent. Just as the dinosaurs were wiped out en masse, a mass extinction is defined by the dying out of at least 3/4 of all species on the planet within a short geologic time of less than 2.8 million years.
At Dinosaurs | Extinctions | Us, you’ll walk through 30 displays that tell the tale of each of these events, and how they led to the rise of the subsequent new worlds. Large-scale murals depicting prehistoric life, produced specially for Six Extinctions, show us the worlds as they used to be, all those hundreds of millions of years before humans came about.
If the herbivorous Patagotitan mayorum didn’t excite you, then you should definitely meet Scotty, the biggest, meanest Tyrannosaurus rex that’s ever been found. Spoiler alert: he’s only 13m big, or just 1/3 the size of Patagotitan mayorum.
Besides Scotty, this part of the exhibition also includes other fossils and skull casts, as well as realistic life models of animals that are extinct today.
After all of that, you’ll find yourself presented with the reality that we are living through Earth’s 6th mass extinction event, AKA the Holocene extinction. This is the only one that has occurred with the interference of us humans, and perhaps not shockingly, it is happening at a much faster rate than any of the 5 extinctions that have come before.
Climate change, habitat destruction, overexploitation, unsustainable consumption – these are all of the human-led activities that have propelled us through this mass extinction event. We have to take action now to slow down its progress, but unless sufficient steps are taken, and soon, it might be too late.
Bringing home this message is the closing gallery, which spotlights species that have gone extinct right here in Singapore, including the Cream-Coloured Giant Squirrel, and Rufous-Collared Kingfisher.
We might be too late to save some of these species, but the development of cutting-edge technology has helped our scientists study extinction records and population numbers that might help to prevent the loss of more species in the future.
Throughout the exhibition, you’ll find kid-friendly activities to keep little hands and minds busy, and to break up the visit into more manageable chunks. Think pieces of simulated dino skin, and fossil replicas you can touch.
Look out for 4 stamping stations, where you can layer the stamps on the provided postcard for your very own dino mural. Don’t miss the hidden theatrettes with videos being screened within too.
Plus, just before you meet Scotty, you’ll find tracing and colouring lightboxes where you and your little ones can put on your creative hats and concoct the dinosaurs of your dreams. Stools are provided too, so nobody is left out.
Wind up your visit with the necessary jaunt through the merchandise store, and good luck walking out without bringing home a dino plushie, or glow-in-the-dark dino stickers.
If you can’t bear to leave just yet, digitally paint a dinosaur and watch it come to life on a digital projection.
We’ve saved the best for last too – there’s an actual excavation site where you can dig up your very own dino fossil. Find all 3 parts of the dinosaur in the same colour, and receive a token for the dino egg gachapon machine to get your prize.
The D.E.U. exhibition is already open, and will run for a limited time only, at The Annexe of the Science Centre Singapore. The experience lasts around 60-90 minutes, but you get to move through at your own pace, so you can decide how long you end up spending there.
There are 2 sessions each day, and you can enter between 10am-1.30pm, or 1.30pm-4pm. The latest you can enter the exhibition is at 4pm, but do note that you’ll only have an hour before it closes at 5pm.
Here’s a table summarising the ticket prices:
| Child/Senior Citizen | Adult | |
| Singaporeans & Permanent Residents (PR) | $25.90 | $29.90 |
| Standard admission | $35.90 | $39.90 |
For Singaporeans and PRs, tickets include complimentary admission to Science Centre Singapore.
All tickets have to be purchased online ahead of your visit, and remember to bring your NRIC for verification purposes if you’ve purchased local-rate tickets. Tickets are required for all children aged 18 months to 8 years old.
Before this, there was only 1 place in Singapore to see real dinosaur fossils, at the LKCNHM. Don’t wait too long to visit Dinosaurs | Extinctions | Us, however, because the 2 exhibitions are on tour, and will move on to their next locations in due time. Unless you’re going to hunt them down somewhere else in the world, this is your chance to see some of the rarest fossils to have landed on our little island.
This post was brought to you by Science Centre Singapore.
Photography by: Thea Imelda Koh
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