Münchehagen Dinosaur Park

Münchehagen Dinosaur Park
Münchehagen Dinosaur Park
place	Münchehagen , Lower Saxony
opening	1992
Visitors	20,000 (2011)
surface	9 hectares
staff	80
Website	www.dinopark.de
Münchehagen Dinosaur Park Location of the park

Coordinates: 52 ° 26 ′ 33 ″  N , 9 ° 12 ′ 2 ″  E

The Münchehagen Dinosaur Park is a privately operated open-air museum in Münchehagen , Lower Saxony , a district of Rehburg-Loccum . It was created around the natural monument dinosaur tracks Münchehagen . The exhibits are primarily life-size dinosaur models.

open air museum

The approximately 2.5-kilometer circular path in the park leads thematically through the history of the earth from the Paleozoic Era to the Mesozoic Era and the Cenozoic Era. Along its course, more than 220 (status: 2010) life-size static models of prehistoric animals, which were created under scientific advice, are set up, matching the respective geological age. The focus is on the dinosaurs, including one of the largest dinosaur models in the world: Seismosaurus with a length of approx. 45 meters. A “museum within a museum” also exhibits some outdated models and explains how the scientific understanding of the appearance of these animals has changed over time.

In the so-called “Join-in Hall”, children in particular have the opportunity to take part in several activities (including digging out an (artificial) dinosaur skeleton, panning for gold, looking for fossils and semi-precious stones, dinosaur painting and kneading ). In a preparation workshop that can be seen by the visitors, original dinosaur bones are prepared, which mainly come from the dwarfed sauropod dinosaur Europesaurus .

Natural monument

The natural monument consists of several fossil dinosaur tracks, which consist of a total of around 250 footprints and were formed around 139 million years ago at the beginning of the Lower Cretaceous in the soft mud of a coastal river delta . Of the total area of ​​15,000 square meters of the natural monument, 3,500 square meters are covered with a hall to protect against the weather. Since 2010, further, excellently preserved dinosaur tracks from allosauroid theropods and iguanodontid ornithopods have been exhibited in the hall , which were recovered from the currently active Wesling quarry in Münchehagen as part of the paleontological excavations initiated by the Dinosaur Park.

literature

• U. Richter: Dinosaur open-air museum and natural monument dinosaur tracks Münchehagen . Verlag Selb, Münchehagen, 1st edition, (2007)
• R. Fischer: The dinosaur tracks in the natural monument Münchehagen in: Issue 37 in the series of the institute reports of the Institute for Geology and Paleontology of the University of Hanover

Web links

Commons : Dinosaurierpark Münchehagen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Homepage