New exhibition organized by American Museum of Natural History opens Memorial Day Weekend throughout the Gardens and in Ford Park!

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.

Organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York with support from North Museum of Nature and Science, United States; Philip J. Currie Museum, Canada; Museo de Ciencias, Universidad de Navarra, Spain; and Universum Museo de las Ciencias de la UNAM, Mexico, Dinosaurs Among Us explores the practically obsolete boundary between the animals we call birds and those we traditionally called dinosaurs. Curated by Dr. Akinobu Watanabe, Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History and Assistant Professor of Anatomy at New York Institute of Technology, this edition of Dinosaurs Among Us is adapted from the Museum’s original exhibition of the same title, curated by Dr. Mark Norell, Curator Emeritus in the Division of Paleontology.

With a mission to protect the alpine environment through education, conservation and living plant collections, it’s particularly fitting that the exhibit is opening at Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, the highest elevation botanical garden in North America. “Our education programs emphasize evolution and adaptation in alpine conservation,” says Education Director, Nanette Kuich. “Just as alpine plants and animals are adapted to the harsh conditions above treeline, one of the reasons some feathered dinosaurs - the ancestors of modern birds - survived is because they, too, were small ground dwellers adapted to eating seeds before trees were wiped out in the mass extinction.”

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. Locals and visitors will have the opportunity to participate in a dinosaur family scavenger hunt, educational activities, and expert speaker events, including:

• From the Ashes of Dinosaurs - Dinosaur Extinction and the Rise of Modern Birds and Mammals with Tyler Lyson, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Denver Museum of Nature & Science
• Dinosaurs of Eagle County with Billy Doran, local paleontologist and dinosaur hunter
• What Did the Dinosaurs Eat? with Gussie Maccracken, Assistant Curator of Paleobotany at Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Details:

Exhibition Opens Memorial Day Weekend 2024

Free and Open to the Public

For more information, please contact Nanette Kuich, Education Director nanette@bettyfordalpinegardens.org

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About the American Museum of Natural History (www.amnh.org)

The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869 with a dual mission of scientific research and science education, is one of the world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses more than 40 permanent exhibition halls, galleries for temporary exhibitions, the Rose Center for Earth and Space including the Hayden Planetarium, and the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The Museum’s scientists draw on a world-class permanent collection of more than 30 million specimens and artifacts, some of which are billions of years old, and on one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Museum offers two of the only free-standing, degree-granting programs of their kind at any museum in the U.S.: the Ph.D. program in Comparative Biology and the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Earth Science residency program. Visit amnh.org for more information.

About Betty Ford Alpine Gardens (www.bettyfordalpinegardens.org)

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens is an internationally acclaimed botanic gardens known for its alpine horticulture, education and conservation. Located in the small resort town of Vail, Colorado which attracts a global audience for its skiing and outdoor recreation, Betty Ford Alpine Gardens is the highest elevation botanical garden in North America situated at 8,200’ (2,700 m) in the central Rocky Mountains. The Gardens attracts more than 200,000 visitors annually to see its unique collection of alpine and mountain plants collected from around the world. Open daily from dawn until dusk.