You see a Titanosaur egg shaped like a cannonball; another one, laid by a half-ton flightless bird that is now extinct, measures about 14 inches in length. Many are leathery pods that feel something like an avocado. To make it hands-on, touching stations are placed around the hall at child-level. A small sandbox invites kids to grab a brush and "dig" for prehistoric eggs, and a video captures what a baby dino would have looked like busting out of its shell. The newborn is an artist's recreation of "Baby Louie," the almost fully-intact dinosaur embryo that was unearthed in fossil form in China in 1993. The little fellow, still in its shell with its bones intact, made the cover of National Geographic three years later. Sleepy, tiny, and toothless, it's almost cute.
The same can't be said for the mammoth Pterosaur, with its 40-foot wingspan and crocodile-like bill. Where the show excels is in the way it portrays the giant beasts at both extremes: as helpless 4-ounce hatchlings and as the two-ton behemoths they become. To make the metamorphosis more comprehensible, Phelan Fretz, ECHO's executive director, has installed huge dinosaur animatronics.
"For kids, when you see eggs next to the animal," Fretz said, "it all comes together."
It also shocks.
One 3-year-old girl saw the rearing, head-swaying Saurolophus and ran screeching for cover, ignoring her father's protestations that it wasn't real. Dasha Ivanova, 6, and her brother Kyrill, 4, played happily beneath the elephant-sized animatronic, though their mother, Olga Ivanova of Colchester, said the sight of it had initially "scared them a lot." After a while, the blend of dino roars and human shrieks seems like part of the show, in the way that Fay Wray's screams enhanced the soundtrack of the 1933 classic "King Kong."
But if a movie does come to mind, it's "Jurassic Park."
