Want to Reinvent Yourself? Come to Florida!

Jurassic Park is returning to McKee Botanical Garden on October 31 for a five-month encore, along with a new T-Rex skull guarding the entrance like a Walmart greeter without the vest. The exciting wire-and-fiberglass dinosaurs – which include a 33-foot Daspletosaurus, the bipedal cousin to T-Rex, a clutch of tiny Sordes with their wingspans coated with fine, hair-like feathers, and the slow and lumbering Dimetrodon encumbered with a giant sail on its back – may again be encountered in McKee’s subtropical hammock.

What makes dinosaurs so awe-inspiring is the thought that, until their mass extinction, they ruled the planet for 100 million years, a long run by anyone’s reckoning. It could have been even longer if you believe the paleontologists who claim that dinosaurs reinvented themselves as birds, like the 6th-century King Sweeney of Ireland who decided that he was a thrush and spent his life in treetops.

Discovering that hummingbirds are descended from the Stegosaurus is like finding out that your cousin is really your father. It’s surprising to say the least. More important, it points to possibilities, to second chances.
McKee is an interesting example of this – the exhibit reinvented itself after its founder’s grandson refused to follow the Grand Guignol of other Florida attractions, like Daytona’s Bongoland or Gatorland’s Jumparoo, where live chickens were dangled over a dozen leaping alligators.

Read the entire article in the November 2009 issue