The museum houses more than 50 lifelike dinosaur models, as well as full skeletons, skulls, and robotic dinosaurs that move, blink, breathe, and roar.
Groups navigate through hundreds of millions of years of the planet’s past with the help of the National Dinosaur Museum’s experienced and enthusiastic tour guides. Students will discover how dinosaurs evolved, where they lived, how they interacted, what they ate, and how they eventually perished. Guides will draw student focus to key elements of the exhibition discussing geological time scales, illuminating Australia’s prehistory, paleontological methods and developments, climactic changes and events, and the ice age and rise of the mega-fauna that followed dinosaur extinction.
Our fun-filled and informative tours are tailored to suit children of all ages from primary through to secondary school. Students are encouraged to extend their learning at the museum through interactive experiences; after a formal discussion in each section guides provide time for students to explore, feel the hands-on fossils and specimens, ask questions, and take photos. Touch a 150 million year old dinosaur bone, a piece of fossilised dinosaur dung over 100 million years old, and a 150kg meteorite. See one of the oldest rocks, and one of the oldest fossils in the world.
Our massive Stegodon, one of the imposing relatives of the woolly mammoth. Standing at 4 meters high and stretching 7.5 meters from tusk to tail our awe-inspiring Stegodon towers over even the tallest person and offers a unique experience.
School group tours are most popular at night, when the museum is closed to the public, but can also be run during normal opening hours. Programs run for a total of 90 minutes with an hour allocated to a guided tour through the exhibition space, and half an hour to spend in our interactive area and to browse through our gift shop which houses Canberra’s largest display of fossils, minerals and crystal specimens for sale.
The National Dinosaur Museum is open every day, bookings are essential, and conditions apply.
