Dinos Alive Brings Prehistoric Fun and a Bit of Science to Denver

They’ve been gone for 65 million years, but dinosaurs still tower over our collective imagination. Maybe it’s their impossible scale, their sudden disappearance or the way they blur the line between science and myth. Whatever the reason, they continue to command awe, a feeling that John Zaller, executive producer of Exhibition Hub’s Dinos Alive: An Immersive Experience, understands intimately.

“I’ve created a lot of dinosaurs for things like Dinos Around the World and Jurassic World: The Exhibition, so I’ve spent a lot of time with dinosaurs, and still I’m endlessly fascinated by them because dinosaurs are endlessly fascinating,” Zaller says. “They seem like they’re mythical creatures, but they actually were real. The mind-boggling thing about putting those pieces together — the length of time they were on the Earth, their incredible size and that complete domination of the world — is that it’s something that never stops revealing another point of fascination or another mystery.”

That enduring fascination powers Dinos Alive, which opened Wednesday, November 5, at Exhibition Hub Art Center Denver. The traveling exhibition transforms the industrial space into a prehistoric playground with 35 life-sized animatronic dinosaurs. Produced by Exhibition Hub, the company behind Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience and Titanic: An Immersive Voyage, it’s organized as a walk-through journey through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, where guests encounter everything from turkey-sized Velociraptors to a towering Tyrannosaurus rex.

“With Dinos Alive, from the time you first enter all the way to the time you leave, the space is completely consumed by this feeling of being in a sort of Mesozoic-era Jungle,” Zaller says. “We’ve got theatrical lighting throughout that’s creating this scene that’s transitioning from day to night, as though you’re going through the whole day with the dinosaurs.”

Since premiering in Los Angeles in 2022, Dinos Alive has stomped across the globe, from Chicago and Raleigh to Paris, Brussels and Sydney. The Denver installation offers a self-guided tour through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, where visitors encounter familiar favorites like the Brachiosaurus and Stegosaurus alongside lesser-known species such as the Suchomimus and Gorgosaurus.

“There’s an introductory video where you essentially learn about what you’re about to experience, and you’re taken through a time portal back to the age of the dinosaurs, and then at the end after you’ve seen all the dinosaurs, we meet the same character, Professor Epoch, who takes you back to the present day, just as the asteroid is coming to strike the Earth,” Zaller explains. “Additionally, we’re using our projection mapping technology and our guest tracking technology to allow you to dive into the prehistoric ocean and swim with the Mosasaurus and the Plesiosaurus and other massive Mesozoic-era creatures. There are a lot of play elements in the experience as well, including two huge dinosaur slides that the kids can play on.”

The experience unfolds in stages, using lighting shifts, soundscapes and artificial foliage to suggest different habitats. While the overall setting, an open warehouse dressed with prehistoric decor, never fully hides its modern framework, the animatronics themselves are impressive. The creatures breathe, blink and roar with surprising fluidity. It’s more theme park than museum, and that’s precisely the point.

“You’re essentially coming face-to-face with them at their full size in their environment,” Zaller says. “We have all these incredible life-sized animatronic dinosaurs in this environment to help you get closer and closer to the dinosaurs and that sense of being a part of the mystery and mystique of dinosaurs.”

Beyond the visual spectacle, Dinos Alive weaves in accessible STEM education. Kids can dig for fossils in the “Budding Experts” area, test their speed against a virtual Velociraptor or explore displays explaining paleontology and evolution. The exhibit’s accompanying educator’s guide expands on those lessons for school groups, blending fun with foundational science.

“When you allow your kids not just to have a great experience but also to learn something along the way, I think that’s really powerful,” Zeller says. “I love creating these experiences because everybody has so much fun at them, but you’ve got an opportunity when people are having so much fun to also teach them something.”

In addition to the animatronics and interactive elements for kids, Dinos Alive offers an optional VR component for an extra $5. Visitors don headsets and begin inside a digital museum, where fossils come to life before a glowing portal pulls them into a lush, prehistoric landscape. Surrounded by towering herbivores and gliding sea creatures, participants get a palpable sense of the dinosaurs’ scale.

“The virtual reality, being a new addition, has been something that took a while to develop in terms of, ‘Okay, what’s the story we’re going to tell?'” Zaller says. “Because it’s a free-roam VR, there’s mapping and coordinating of all the headsets that we need, and that’s definitely the part that takes the most technical work in the whole exhibit.”

Dinos Alive is scheduled to run in Denver for six months, though organizers say it could extend based on demand. Exhibition Hub is betting big on dinosaurs, and Zeller believes the exhibit has what it takes to appeal to children and families throughout the metro area and beyond.

“The dinosaurs still always excite me,” he says. “You can get as close to it as you can, to its jaws, while it’s roaring. Our dinosaurs are very animatronic; they’ve got all kinds of levels of movement. We make it feel safe and it’s fun, but if you put yourself in the face of some of these carnivores, and you just picture for a second what it was like to encounter what other animals felt encountering them in the wild, I think it could take you back and really give you a nice, mindful meditation on how safe you are.”

Dinos Alive is open Wednesday through Monday from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and Friday & Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m at Exhibition Hub, 3900 Elati Street. Tickets are $18.90 to $34.90. Learn more at dinosaliveexhibit.com/denver/.