A themed tour with dinosaurs has been attracting the interest of children and adults in these last days of school holidays in São Paulo.
The T-Rex Park, in the parking lot of Shopping D, has 19 attractions inspired by “Jurassic Park”, where some replicas of the famous reptilian predator with a somewhat exaggerated size share space with other animals – such as a carousel of horses, for example, the which represents a displacement on the geological scale of at least 66 million years.
Visitors can also have the experience of being inside a dinosaur egg with dimensions far beyond reality and seeing up close replicas of other dinosaurs that, at least in the view of the park’s organizers, cohabited the planet more than 100 million years ago. . But not quite.
Therein lies the problem: the replicas, despite being well-made and mostly automated, do not have any signs or informational material that would give any clue as to who the prehistoric animals are. And all are mixed without any criteria.
In the same environment, species as different — and distant — as the Stegosaurus american and the Velociraptor Asia, who, in addition to geographical distance, also lived at different times.
It is true that there are other species of carnivores in the park besides the T. rex, but all are of more recent origin. They would not be able to feed themselves, for example, from amargasaurus exposed on site, representative of a family of herbivorous dinosaurs with a distribution in the southern hemisphere, known for the expanded spines that form a kind of sail on the neck.
Ankylosaurus, which lived with the T. rex at the end of the Cretaceous period, with an exotic appearance given its cover of osteoderms and carapace, and the hadrosaurid Parasaurolophus, herbivore with an anvil head, draw attention for being very well done representations of the weirdest animals that inhabited the Earth 70 million years ago.
But it has all dinosaurs are identifiable. Other representations of carnivores carry traits of the T. rex, with a single pair of fingers on the upper limbs, but a head that most closely resembles that of theropods of the genus Carcharodontosaurus, easily recognized by two crests at the top, from the tip of the nose to the eyebrow. There was, so to speak, poetic license in the representation of some dinos.
It is sad to see the lack of representation of fossil species discovered in Brazil. One of the attractions is a kind of Viking boat with the body of a pterosaur — which are prehistoric reptiles, but not dinosaurs. But it is more similar to American pterodactyls than to those that existed here, such as the pterosaurs with crests on their heads found in the Araripe region, in the Northeast, as the well-known Tupandactylus.
As the image of a pterosaur that populates the collective imagination is more of a combination of a bird of prey and a flying lizard, it’s hard to even imagine which species inspired the attraction — if any at all.
If you leave science aside, the space is even fun and offers options for both children and adults. It is true that dinosaurs arouse curiosity and enchantment, especially among the little ones, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a good dose of science when having fun.
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