I was Stumbling through videos recently as I’m apt to do and I came across something quite spectacular. There’s a lot of interesting fodder uploaded to the various video networks, demanding a spectrum of emotional reaction but the video below REALLY caught my attention. It could be the kid in me but I thought this was spectacular on a creative, inventive, educational and ingeniously marketed level.

The Museum of Natural History in Los Angles has hired the help of puppet fabricators and the museum’s own paleontologists to recreate a 14-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex and a nine-foot Triceratops to walk the halls of the museum. In this video you can see how the kids are interacting with the T-Rex. They are completely blown away, exhibiting reactions of amazement and in some instances fear.

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Museums are always trying to come up with new and interesting ways to bring people in and this would be as close to the Jurassic Park hysteria as one could get. Kids absolutely love this kind of stuff and the parents are going to be led by the incessant pleading of the children to “go see the dinosaurs”.

I don’t know if the museum’s marketing department was responsible for recording and uploading videos of the dinosaurs in action but it was a fantastic idea. I’ve found several different videos of the dinosaurs on YouTube, MySpace, and Vimeo so it looks like they’re getting great coverage. The video with the most views is the one I’ve pasted here.

Kudos to the Museum of Natural History in Los Angles. I don’t know what the production cost of the dino-suits and puppeteers were but I would guess that the ROI was entirely worth it. Good work!