Dinosaur Gallery
hall opened 1988; displays renewed since
A tall hall with a wall of windows opens onto a scene of dinosaurs that most children in Taiwan will remember for life. A moving, roaring Tyrannosaurus rears above the floor, long necked sauropods stretch toward the ceiling, and around them smaller mounted skeletons and casts trace the animals that ruled the land for more than a hundred and fifty million years. The gallery sits on the ground level of the Life Science Hall and is the museum's most visited space. It is designed to be walked through as a story: the origins of dinosaurs, their variety, their world, and the mass extinction that ended it sixty six million years ago.
Look first at the animatronic models, which move their heads and tails on a timed cycle and are built from research on how the animals were put together. Then compare them with the real bones and casts nearby, where you can see the hollow structure of a sauropod vertebra or the serrated edge of a theropod tooth. Labels explain how the museum's own palaeontologists work with colleagues in China and North America, and the museum's collection includes rare specimens such as dinosaur eggs from southern China and skeletons of Asian sauropods from Gansu.
The National Museum of Natural Science was the first of Taiwan's large modern science museums, opened in stages from 1986, and the Life Science Hall of 1988 was designed with the British exhibition designer James Gardner. Its dinosaur displays set the pattern that other museums in the region followed. A memorable detail is the view from the gallery's upper walkway, where you look down on the Tyrannosaurus at eye level and can watch the crowd below react each time it roars.
Did You Know? The animatronic Tyrannosaurus has roared on a timed cycle for so many years that it has become an unofficial mascot for the city of Taichung.
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