Dinosaurs – Talk of the Town
Leisure and Cultural Services Department

Exemplary Services@Gov
2015
Only Cantonese version is available for this video

Legends of the Giant Dinosaurs, an exhibition hosted by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department's Hong Kong Science Museum during 2013-2014, has been the largest and most diverse dinosaur exhibition ever held in Hong Kong. Realistic dinosaur models, precious fossils and well-designed interactive games attracted more than 770,000 visitors, who enjoyed having a close look at the magnificent dinosaurs as if they had travelled back through time to the prehistoric world.

Finest exhibits around the world and innovative activities

In order to enrich the exhibition content, the Hong Kong Science Museum worked with 13 Mainland and overseas institutes and borrowed their signature exhibits. The exhibition hall area was expanded to 2,500 square metres. 190 exhibits were on display, among which were precious fossils including fully intact skeletons, skulls, vertebrae, feathered dinosaurs and dinosaur eggs. The way of presentation is the first of its kind, employing state-of-art technology, large multimedia animations, robotic dinosaurs, interactive exhibits, mobile applications, and more. Furthermore, the spectacular 30 metre-long robotic dinosaur became the talk of the town and an eye-opener for the public.

The museum has also published the first dinosaur comic book in Hong Kong and designed a diverse collection of activities to enhance the educational aspect of the exhibition. For example, the family programme "A Night with Dinosaurs" gave family groups the unique opportunity to stay in the museum overnight with the dinosaurs. To ensure that participants would gain the optimal experience, the museum went through careful planning and preparation. In addition to holding a briefing for parents to learn more about the programme, the team also took the initiative to conduct a trial run, playing the role of participants to test the facilities and the workflow before the programme so that any potential problems could be solved in advance.

Flexible arrangements and considerate planning

Throughout the design stage and the exhibition period, the museum team was very careful in their planning and flexible in their arrangements, and responsive to the visitors’ flow and opinions to bring about a memorable experience for the visitors. For instance, the admission waiting time was generally less than ten minutes and the display platforms were designed in such a way that visitors were free to sit down and rest.

The exhibition was very popular with the public from the start, with as many as 10,000 visitors on the first day. To accommodate such volume, the team immediately adopted a number of measures, including changing the locations of the exhibits on the first night, and putting up more notices to facilitate crowd management. In special consideration of the many child visitors, the team converted the Resource Centre into a temporary storage room for strollers.

It is the museum’s mission to promote scientific knowledge and public interest in science. The exhibition not only deepened the public’s understanding of palaeontology, but also increased collaboration with other institutions, thereby setting a prime example for the development of museums in Hong Kong.

A group of large robotic dinosaurs put on display outside the museum became the talk of the town.
“A Night with Dinosaurs” offered family groups an opportunity to spend a splendid night with the company of dinosaurs.
The museum employed new technology to create interactive exhibits and mobile applications allowing dinosaurs coming alive.