OGDEN — If you want to journey back in time to when dinosaurs roamed the earth, you don’t actually have to go very far. Just head over to Ogden’s George S. Eccles Dinosaur Park. Jeff Bond, is the Education Director for the Dinosaur Park, and he says that this park shares a lot in common with another famous Dinosaur Park.
“The Eccles Dinosaur Park, we've been here since 1993,” he says. “Opened the same year as Jurassic Park came out, so we're kind of fans of that here and actually, we're a little bit the same as Jurassic Park, except our Dinosaurs aren't alive. Most of our exhibits are outside, but we have quite a substantial exhibit inside so we can be open your year round.”
And though these dinosaurs are not a live, they are still pretty cool and these fossils come from all world!
“A lot of our dinosaurs come from Wyoming,” says Bond. “But we have dinosaurs from as far away as Africa, Asia, and it's not just dinosaurs either we have quite a variety of different kinds of fossils represented here everything from some of the earliest bats, to trilobites... but we do have a lot of original fossils here. And some of them. You can even touch.”
For many visitors, touching and seeing the past, is believing. That’s one of the reasons that Eccles Dinosaur Park is so popular with school groups, summer camps, youth programs. Every group gets a presentation from a member of the staff and then kids can go on a scavenger hunt around the eight and a half park with their guide books, looking for dinosaurs in a fun educational environment.
“At last count it was about 115 statues out there, and representing about 70 extinct species. Most of them are dinosaurs but we have other kinds of animals that are just amazing weirdos.”
And that’s what makes Eccles Dinosaur Park so unique. Anyone can come in and combine science with imagination. Bond says that he, like so many, has never lost his interest in dinosaurs.
“The Wonder never really does go away, there's just something so endlessly fascinating about even studying just one dinosaur and Paleontology is accelerating, so quickly, we are getting all these new species and all these new studies. It just keeps delving deeper and deeper and the more that we study it, the more interesting it gets.”
For more information on Eccles Dinosaur Park, log onto their website at www.dinosaurpark.org.
