STL Science Center

STL Science Center

14 May 2018

Fun to Type

Tuojiangosaurus is actually fairly easy to spell after the first two or three times you type it out: fun personal observational fact/opinion that I just decided upon. If anyone disagrees, I can completely understand why, but give it a few more tries before you give up. Additionally, despite searching the blog the other day to see if we had covered this animal before and for some reason nothing seemed to show up, I noticed today that we had covered it, six years ago. However, revisiting old friends now and again is always interesting and fun. An even more fun fact about that time is that I found out that I was accepted to the biology graduate program at Fort Hays, which means that Tuojiangosaurus was the first dinosaur we discussed during my non-educator focused graduate career. Pretty neat stuff there. Anyway, on to the important aspects of why anyone opens this page on a Monday: movies about the animal we are featuring this week.

Back in 2012 there were not many, if any, videos of Tuojiangosaurus on the internet, a point that I noted by sharing the one short documentary I could find at the time that discusses Tuojiangosaurus in any detail (the 9:18 clip is featured below again today and our stegosaur appears at the 3:00 minute mark). Tuojiangosaurus now, though, appears in video game clips and short movies all over YouTube, but that is hardly the end of its representation online in video format. There is a video of an animatronic version of the Chinese stegosaur from the Henry Doorly Zoo (in Omaha, NE) and Brookfield Zoo's (in Chicago, IL) Dinosaurs Alive exhibits. This animatronic dinosaur exhibit can be found at many different zoos under the same or slightly different names at different times of the year; one of the series of photos I have shared here in the past was from the Memphis Zoo's version simply titled "Dinosaurs". The Tuojiangosaurus featured in the exhibit is a little less like the actual fossil than we would like. However, it does encourage people to look up the dinosaur and see what they should really be seeing (as opposed to what they did see), which is a good place to start educating more people about our favorite fossil animals. In a similar vein, this video from the Dinosaur Quest at the San Antonio River Mall shows fossil casts rather than animatronic dinosaurs.There are countless video game videos of the dinosaur surrounding the links shared here and the short clip below, but I will leave these to the reader to discover at their leisure or desire.

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