Dinosaurs are taking over Exposition Park on Sunday as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County hosts the 11th annual Dino Fest, a full day of fossils, paleontologists and hands-on activities running from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The festival is included with paid museum admission, and museum members get early access starting at 9 a.m.
According to MyNewsLA.com, visitors can meet paleontologists from the museum's Dinosaur Institute and other institutions, watch a demonstration of fossils being wrapped in plaster field jackets for transport, and catch a dinosaur puppet artist at work. The day also includes a storytime, a discussion with paleontologists and a presentation on the animals that survived the mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs, museum officials say the museum's paleontology collections are the largest on the West Coast, holding more than 12 million specimens.
Screenings Pair TV Science With Dinosaur Institute Research
Dino Fest will screen T. rex 3D, which requires an additional charge, along with an episode of NBC's Surviving Earth titled When the Asteroid Fell, focused on the aftermath of the extinction event. The episode's executive producer, Tim Haines, joins Dinosaur Institute curator Nathan Smith for a virtual question-and-answer session before the screening. The series premiered in June 2026 as an eight-part speculative documentary and used CGI creatures to depict Cretaceous survival strategies, according to the Paleontology Documentary Wiki.
The museum's Dinosaur Encounters program returns as well, using large-scale puppets and multimedia storytelling to explore paleontology, though those performances require additional admission. Kids can also meet Buddy the dinosaur from PBS's Dinosaur Train, and a Lego Build the Change activity focuses on protecting birds, framed around the fact that birds are themselves living dinosaurs.
Dinosaur Hall's Green-Boned Star Anchors the Visit
Visitors can also wander Dinosaur Hall, including its T. rex growth series, and explore the L.A. Underwater exhibition, which examines a period millions of years ago when much of present-day Los Angeles sat beneath the Pacific Ocean. That hall's centerpiece has long been Thomas the T. rex, a 34-foot-long subadult excavated in Montana in 2003 with roughly 70 percent of its skeleton preserved, according to the Los Angeles Times. The 14,000-square-foot hall opened in July 2011, doubling the footprint of the museum's previous dinosaur galleries to display more than 300 fossils and 20 full-body mounts, per the Moorpark Acorn.
Since then, the museum has added an even more unusual permanent attraction just steps away in NHM Commons, the $75 million free-admission wing that opened in 2024 as a community welcome center, as LAist reported. That's where Gnatalie lives — a 75-foot-long sauropod skeleton whose bones turned green through celadonite mineral replacement during fossilization, making it the only mounted green-boned dinosaur on public display anywhere in the world, as reported by AP News.
A Museum Built on 4.5 Billion Years of Southern California
Founded in Exposition Park in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art, the institution is now the largest natural history museum in the western United States, housing 35 million specimens spanning 4.5 billion years, according to Frommer's. That scale extends well beyond dinosaurs: NHM's marine displays connect ancient prehistoric fossils to modern finds like a Pacific footballfish pulled from waters off Newport Beach, Visit California has reported.
The Dinosaur Institute's fieldwork keeps feeding those collections. Earlier this month, Metro's D Line subway expansion beneath Wilshire Boulevard turned up more than 500 Ice Age fossils, with the non-asphaltic sediment specimens routed straight to NHM for long-term archiving while asphalt-encased fossils went to the nearby La Brea Tar Pits, as Hoodline previously reported. Just over a week before Dino Fest, the museum also hosted Prehistoric Fight Night, an after-hours event at NHM Commons where experts debated fantasy matchups between dinosaurs and Ice Age mammals while guests explored Dinosaur Hall after dark.
Advance reservations are recommended for Dino Fest, and some programs require separate tickets beyond regular admission. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is located at 900 Exposition Blvd. in Los Angeles.
