Dakota Dinosaur Museum

One of the things that we saw plenty of on our trip to Western South Dakota and North Dakota was dinosaurs, fossils of dinosaurs to be precise. The Dakota Dinosaur Museum of Dickinson North Dakota is a unique museum and set apart from some of the other museums by it's unique displays, sculptures and how it became a part of North Dakota's tourism.

There are quite a few museums dedicating themselves to showing off their collections of fossilized reptiles, animals and other creatures and even rock and mineral collections. One of the big things that sets this museum apart from the others that we visited was you actually got to see, behind a glass wall of course, a dinosaur casting in progress. At the back of the museum they have set up a lab that shows how they go about casting a dinosaur into plaster to create a protective case for the bones as they are transported. At least that was what we had seen when we were there. The museum changes the display routinely to add variety to the exhibits so that you can visit the museum and never get bored with your tour.

They have a wide variety of dinosaur fossils and displays for them. They have created a unique mix of dinosaur fossils, recreated scale dinosaurs, rock and mineral collections, vertebrate and invertebrate fossils and some other interesting displays. The one thing that I noticed at first about the exhibits when I walked in was that the dinosaurs have skin. They have several dinosaurs that have been recreated by an artist, John Fischner of Needville Texas, fleshed out the dinosaur sculptures of the museum, creating very life like dinosaurs.