Way way back, in the tail-end of the Mesozoic Era, a stray Ornithomimus gads about in prehistoric Texas. In 1992, Dr. Mike Duffin discovers the theropod’s tracks in Zilker Park, where a limestone quarry had been cleared for a future butterfly garden. Were this a movie, here’s where time skips again, to the 21st century, and we see kids, parents, and paleontologists populating the Hartman Prehistoric Garden at Zilker Botanical Garden to celebrate this dino-tastic legacy. In what has now become a spring tradition, families can enjoy not just hands-on crafting but exploration of the garden’s more than 100 Cretaceous cycads, conifers, and other period-accurate plants. Now there’s family fun 66 million years in the making.
courtesy of Zilker Botanical Garden
