Where Dinosaurs Roar Back

From the New York Times: Where Dinosaurs Roar Back
YOU might not expect to find dinosaurs moving in the marshy wilderness between the Hackensack River and the New Jersey Turnpike.

But then, you would not have met Guy Gsell. The founding director of Discovery Times Square and a living example of what happens when that kid obsessed with dinosaurs grows up and doesn’t lose the obsession, Mr. Gsell, 51, wanted to build an outdoor dinosaur exhibition. Not the kind of cartoonish dinosaurs you might see at a mini-golf course, but life-size dinosaurs that move when you go near them. 

And because he wanted his dinosaurs near a train station and a highway, he decided to plunk them down on 20 acres in the Meadowlands here in New Jersey, under a looming 150 million-year-old rock face on the former site of an old mental hospital. 

The result is Field Station: Dinosaurs, which opens to school groups May 14 and the public on Memorial Day weekend. Mr. Gsell spent a year and a half exploring dinosaur shows in this country and abroad before contracting with a company in Zigong, China (“the dinosaur capital of China,” he said) to build 31 animatronic creatures with sensors and facial-recognition technology that make them move as visitors come close. A gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex will even recoil if the crowd around it gets big enough, and if you yell, Mr. Gsell promised, T. rex will roar back.

 Mr. Gsell said this would be the only permanent exhibition of its kind (though smaller shows of animatronic dinosaurs have toured this country). The dinosaurs were being unloaded this week with the help of five artists and engineers who had accompanied them from China. They will be set along a three-quarter-mile trail where the foliage has been left largely as it is, to give the sense that the dinosaurs are in their natural environment. The effect is more sculpture garden than theme park.

But Mr. Gsell has also worked with paleontologists at the New Jersey State Museum to set up other exhibits along the paths suitable for children from 2 to 11, including puppet shows, game shows and a dig site where groups can scrabble for fossils. (While dinosaurs did once roam New Jersey, the fossils are reproductions.)

Tents set up along the paths give the feeling of a base camp and exploration sites. At the highest point of the site is a 90-foot Argentinosaurus, with a view of the Empire State Building in the distance. Mr. Gsell said this dinosaur would be visible from Manhattan. Do not be alarmed.