Dinosaur Day is an annual burke event, it’s a family event
we have every year
and it is
probably
our single most popular day at the museum
An attendance of about two thousand people
I think it's because everyone loves dinosaurs
especially little kids and so
it’s our day each year that we bring fossils out of the collection
bring them upstairs
let people see them 
Have no glass in between them and the triceratops fossil
they get a really good chance to
see the fossil up close, and talk to paleontologists 
to find out all the questions that
they've been always wanting to ask someone
so it's not only to see the fossil but kids can actually crack open their own fossil and take one 
home with them-
fossil plants from republic Washington.
They get a chance to draw dinosaurs, they
get a chance to dress up like dinosaurs.
They get a chance to kind of
become a dinosaur for the day.
Kids have a passion for dinosaurs
that
is really great to see.
It’s their interest in the natural world and they're
interest in history
and
I love being able to communicate
my interest in both of those fields to someone
Who is really just as interested as I am.
The single most
popular question is, “Is this real?”
and I love to be able to say to kids,
“Yes, this is the actual sixty five million-year-old
tyrannosaurus tooth.”
And let them actually feel
the cutting edge
on it -- that kind of stuff is just great.
“it's one of those real formative experiencesI
that
people think about fossils as these
big and dead things.
But, you forget that they’re actually what makes up the fossil record 
Are actually these 
individual pieces here and there, and 
and it's a real great opportunity for
little kids to actually see the real thing.
The other thing we do every year than it is
we actually prepare fossils live. We actually
do the extraction of that bone or whatever it is
out of the rock
in front of people.
so you have a nice plexi-glass shield, so the kids can
get right up next to it and actually see
the bone emerge
from that rock.
Our preparator, Bruce Crowley, 
this is what he does every day,
forty hours a week, but
on dino day he sits there with a lamp,
microscope and everything
and a video camera showing what he sees,
projected behind him so the kids can
actually see how long it takes and how careful you
have to be and the kind of patience you have to have
to extract that fossil.
I think the museum is a great link between
the research that happens on campus
and the Washington state in seattle communities
So many people think that the university has all this high-tech research going on,
and it’s true, but
the museum is sort of the best place I think
to
share what's happening on campus, not just in the natural sciences,
but in ethnology or
Native American Studies, or anything like that
into for greater community.
I mean, we’re the natural venue for it.
The thing is that 
we are the Washington natural history museum and we’re basically the Seattle natural history museum.
Nowhere else in Seattle can you go
and see real fossils on display
any day of the year.
And these kind of public events
are even better
at drawing people in who
sometimes forget about all that’s happening on
campus.
I think all kids go through that
Phase in life when they love dinosaurs, and
I guess some us just never grow out of it.
