A 16-foot-long, 8-foot-tall dinosaur made almost entirely of plastic bricks now looms over visitors at Cincinnati Museum Center, the centerpiece of a touring exhibition that has taken over the historic Union Terminal building through January 4, 2027. The Baryonyx model, built from 102,317 LEGO bricks and weighing nearly 900 pounds, took the exhibition's design team 790 hours to construct, making it one of the newest additions created specifically for this traveling show.
LEGO® Jurassic World: The Exhibition includes more than 50 dinosaurs built from over six million LEGO bricks in total, according to WCPO 9 Cincinnati. The models were assembled by a team led by Ryan “The Brickman” McNaught, who according to The Brickman heads a 35-person Melbourne design crew and is one of only about 20 LEGO Certified Professionals in the world — and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere, a credential detailed by El País. Per museum staff, the Brickman team spent two years piecing the exhibition together before it reached Ohio.
Among the trickiest builds was a Velociraptor model named Blue, which The Brickman notes required 460 hours of labor and 58,227 bricks to capture the raptor's organic curves and balance — a technical challenge the build team considered one of its most demanding. The exhibition also recreates iconic scenes from the Jurassic World franchise alongside interactive props, giving the display a mix of static sculpture and movie-set atmosphere.
Hands-On Bricks Beyond the Display Cases
The exhibit isn't limited to look-but-don't-touch viewing. Visitors get access to 2.5 million loose LEGO bricks spread across interactive stations, where they can design hybrid dinosaurs in a DNA lab, build their own escape vehicles, and add pieces to a communal mystery mosaic, according to Cincinnati Museum Center. Those hands-on elements are meant to pull kids and families into active building rather than passive walking-through.
Cincinnati Museum Center offers both standard and flex tickets for the run, with WCPO reporting that Cincy Lifestyle host Michelle Hopkins previewed the exhibition ahead of its extended stay. Standard admission runs $19.50 for adults and $14.50 for seniors and children, the museum says, with single-day flex tickets available for a $5 surcharge and a $3 back-to-school discount offered throughout August. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
An Eight-Month Run Inside a National Landmark
This is a rare stateside stop for the exhibition. Before Cincinnati, LEGO Jurassic World by Brickman made its U.S. premiere in March 2025 at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, where it ran through September 2025. Its Cincinnati stint, which opened in May, is set to run roughly eight months, closing January 4, 2027.
The exhibition is housed inside the Art Deco Cincinnati Union Terminal in the Queensgate neighborhood, a landmark that, per Wikipedia, contains the largest half-dome in the Western Hemisphere and originally opened as a passenger railroad station in 1933. Cincinnati Museum Center has leaned on that architectural pedigree before, including in its recent fundraising push tied to a Revolutionary War flag campaign.
A Bridge to the Museum's Real Fossils
The LEGO exhibit sits just steps from the museum's permanent Dinosaur Hall inside its Museum of Natural History & Science, which features six rare Jurassic-era specimens. Among them, per WVXU, is the world's only mounted, 55%-complete skeleton of a 30-foot-long Torvosaurus, a fossil discovered in Colorado and donated by a local native. The pairing lets the museum funnel families drawn in by plastic bricks toward its actual paleontology collection down the hall.
The timing follows a strong stretch for the institution overall. USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards ranked the Cincinnati History Museum second and the Children's Museum third among the nation's top venues in their categories in February, both housed within the same Union Terminal complex. Ahead of the exhibition's official May 22 opening, the museum ran a presale in April followed by “Jurassic June” programming that included scientist Q&A sessions and official LEGO giveaways.
