Saturday 15 May: don’t miss the Dinosaur’s Birthday Party
Posted on 14/05/10
The Oxfordshire Museum at Woodstock is celebrating its megalosaur’s first birthday from 11am – 4pm – admission is free.
The Birthday Boy.
The Oxfordshire Museum is set in beautiful surroundings in the heart of the historic town of Woodstock, almost next door to Blenheim Palace. In May last year, the museum unveiled its award-winning dinosaur garden, which includes a full-size replica of a megalosaur, a meat-eating dinosaur which roamed Oxfordshire around 168 million years ago. Fossilised footprints unearthed near Bichester, thought to be from the species, were also put on display.
The megalosaur was the first dinosaur – other than birds – to be described scientifically, following the discovery of part of a bone at a limestone quarry near Chipping Norton in 1676. The bone was sent to Robert Plot, professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and the first curator at the city’s Ashmolean Museum, who published a description in his 1677 work Natural History of Oxfordshire.
The whole family is invited to join the party for the megalosaur’s first birthday. Make plaster fossils with the assistance of staff from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, create a dinosaur mask and make a clay dinosaur. Handle dinosaur bones with the help of the Oxford Geology Trust, dig for treasures and eat jurassic theme lunches from the museum’s cafe.
Entrance to the county council-run museum and to the event is free, but there will be small charges for some of the activities.
The Museum tells the story of Oxfordshire through 11 galleries and many exhibitions featuring history, popular culture, contemporary arts and crafts throughout the year. The Museum gardens, which contain botanical species relevant to jurassic times, received the Royal Horticultural Award for the Best Garden to Interpret Local Roots in the Thames Valley region last autumn.
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