This week is the beginning of “Big Big Dinosaur Week” on PBS Kids and to kick it off PBS SoCal brought Buddy the Dinosaur to The Natural History Museum this past Saturday for Dinosaur Train Day.
My kids have been in love with Dinosaur Train since the very first episode. They are a bit too old for it now, but when I asked them if they wanted to go see Buddy and hear the Dinosaur Train Band (Craig Bartlett’s band who is the show’s creator) they said yes right away.
And they weren’t the only ones. There were long lines to get into the museum, one of our favorite in Los Angeles.
The first thing we did was see Craig Bartlett play. The band was really fun (they did a pre-show performance of Major Tom) and played to a packed room.
We haven’t been to the museum since the Dinosaur Hall was renovated. It was like going to an entirely new museum; there was so much to see. The fossil below was discovered in a dig in Utah three years ago and it’s from a yet unnamed dinosaur. Below that is a photo of a triceratops.
After learning as much as we could about dinosaurs, we went outside to the museum’s Butterfly Pavilion. It’s spectacular if you have ever have the chance to go. The pavilion is open from April to September and hosts more than 50 species of butterflies and moths.
As we left my boys posed for the picture at the top in the Dinosaur Train. This week, August. 13 through 17, there PBS Kids will premiere 4 new episodes and introduce a new flatbed train car. According to PBS Kids “The kick-off episode begins aboard the Dinosaur Train when the Pteranodon family gets the idea to travel around and meet some of the biggest dinosaurs. They even sing the song, ‘The Biggest Dinosaurs’, before meeting Allie Alamosaurus, an enormous and friendly long-necked, plant eating sauropod.”
For more information about Dinosaur Trains’ new episodes visit PBS Kids.
