‘Antarctic Dinosaurs’ brings the icy experience of digging for bones to Discovery Place

Antarctic explorers are perhaps the toughest breed of humans, braving temperatures of minus 50 degrees, altitudes of 12,000 feet and months of back-breaking expeditions that could come up empty.

So while dinosaurs get title billing in Discovery Place Science’s latest exhibit, “Antarctic Dinosaurs,” there’s loads to learn about how paleontologists work in frozen tundra.

Guests can sit in a replica LC-130 cargo plane while imagining heading to Earth’s southernmost continent, and see the Canada goose parkas, goggles and the astronaut-looking “bunny boots” explorers wear.

Plus, see fossils and the elongated wooden sled that accompanied Capt. Robert Falcon Scott on the Terra Nova expedition, his second attempt to be first to reach the South Pole. Scott and his crew of five reached their destination in January 1912. However, Norwegian explorers had beaten them by mere weeks. On their way home, they died in a blizzard.

Fast-forward to today, and there’s a fabricated quarry camp complete with working power tools (yes, the jackhammer is operational, but can’t be pulled from the synthetic rock), and a replica of the spot on Mount Kirkpatrick where a 2010 expedition unearthed dinosaur bones from the early Jurassic period.

Discovery Place has offered dinosaur exhibits in the past — most recently “Tyrannosaurus: Meet the Family” in 2018 — but “Antarctic Dinosaurs” has something others didn’t: actual fossils and other specimens taken from Antarctica.

“In traveling exhibits, you often have mostly casts and replicas, things that can travel well, ... but (in this exhibit) there’s close to 100, if not more, actual physical specimens,” said Nathan Smith, a paleontologist who recovered some of the fossils displayed in the exhibit and one of the exhibit’s co-curators.

Smith, who’s currently a curator of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Institute in Los Angeles County, was in Charlotte Friday to talk about the exhibit prior to Saturday’s opening. Smith was on three Antarctic expeditions, in 2003, 2010 and 2017.

“Antarctic Dinosaurs,” a traveling exhibition, was developed by the Field Museum in Chicago in partnership with Discovery Place, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Natural History Museum of Utah. It heads to Utah after it’s time in Charlotte ends May 25.

Actual specimens

One of the specimens children will love most can be touched — a 140-pound fossil block from Mt. Kirkpatrick, where Smith and his team spent months roaming for dinosaur fossils.

No dinosaur exhibit is complete without plenty of life-sized skeletons and flesh-on reproductions to gaze up at, and “Antarctic Dinosaurs” delivers on both.

Four new species of dinosaurs, all discovered in Antarctica within the last 30 years, are showcased in the exhibit. There is a replica of the Cryolophosaurus, the largest and most complete early Jurrasic theropod in the world that is unique to Antarctica.

And, a life-sized replica of Sauropodomorph, which is smaller than Cryolophosaurus but only because it’s a juvenile, Smith said.

Guests also can find out why Antarctica was once a lush, tropical paradise transformed into an icy continent.

“We’re telling a big story that’s not just about the dinosaurs, but about what it’s like to go to Antarctica and the science that we’re learning about the continent,” Smith said.

Antarctic Dinosaurs

When: Feb. 8 to May 25

Where: Discovery Place Science, 301 N. Tryon St.

Admission: $22 adult, $18 child, $20 senior, $3 member

Details: discoveryplace.org or 704-372-6261.

This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 3:49 PM.