Description

The next time you see a Red-tailed Hawk making lazy circles in the Colorado sky or spy a Ptarmigan foraging for seeds in the high alpine, consider yourself lucky: You just had an encounter with a modern dinosaur! In fact, dinosaurs never really vanished from Earth. While most did go extinct, their evolutionary legacy lives on all around us— in the form of modern-day birds.

More kinds of dinosaurs live on Earth today than have ever been described by paleontologists. We call them birds, and there are perhaps up to 18,000 living species. The mass extinction that erased most dinosaurs about 65 million years ago left a few bird lineages unscathed and, in only 15 million years—an evolutionary heartbeat—all of the familiar groups we know today were flourishing. Dinosaurs Among Us highlights some of these amazing species and the vivid link they provide to the ancient past in ecosystems all over the planet, from tropical forests to frozen tundra. Their diversity and success across the planet can mean only one thing—the new Age of Dinosaurs is now.

Opening Memorial Day Weekend, panels with large-scale color illustrations of familiar and newly discovered extinct dinosaur species as they would have looked in life will be visible at the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens Education Center and throughout Ford Park. In addition to viewing the panels, visit the crystalline beauty of the Gardens’ diverse collection of more than 3,000 native and exotic alpine perennials.

Free and open to the public dawn through dusk daily. Learn more here.