Travel: Cincinnati Museum Center offers in-depth look at prehistoric Antarctica

CINCINNATI – Haven’t had enough winter yet?

How about a quick trip to Antarctica – and the Jurassic Period – via the Cincinnati Museum Center (cincymuseum.org)?

This is the final week for the center’s Dinosaurs of Antarctica exhibit, which presents recent discoveries of huge predators and other creatures who lived on the now-frigid continent 200 million years ago when it was lush and warm.

Visitors to the exhibit enter past big-screen videos of modern researchers dwarfed by otherworldly Antarctic landscapes such as Shackleton Glacier and Dry Valley. The journey continues through galleries depicting the history of Antarctic exploration up to the present day, including a mock-up of a polar transport plane that puts visitors in the midst of the excitement.

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The exhibit is illustrated throughout with graphic-novel style panels featuring actual modern-day Antarctic researchers from around the world, with information about the work they’re doing in many scientific fields near the South Pole.

But the star of the show is the re-created, full-sized Cryolophosaurus ellioti, the first dinosaur discovered in Antarctica.

The fierce, 25-foot-long beast, thought to have resembled a gigantic carnivorous cassowary, even has a tie to the Buckeye State. The first Cryolophosaurus fossils were discovered in 1990 by geologist David Elliot of the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University and recovered by paleontologist Bill Hammer, who named the creature in honor of Elliot.

And don’t worry if you can’t visit the museum center before the Dinosaurs of the Antarctic exhibit goes extinct after Jan. 22. Plenty of dinosaurs – plus the entire Ice Age – are on permanent exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science, one of several institutions located at the museum center in historic Union Terminal.

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Union Terminal, a former passenger train station that opened in 1934, underwent a massive multi-year restoration beginning in 2016, reopening at the end of 2018 after a two-and-a-half-year closure. For those who have never been there or haven’t visited since the closure, it’s worth a trip just to see the beautifully renovated Art Deco-style station, which was once a bustling hub of rail transportation during the golden age of passenger train travel – and is one of my favorite buildings in the entire state.

Guided lobby tours are offered most days with information about the history of the building and features such as its glorious mosaic wall murals.

The renovation included installation of many new and rejuvenated museum exhibits, including Dinosaur Hall, a 7,000 square-foot gallery in the natural history museum that features rare or unique dinosaur specimens displayed where once train travelers made their migrations.

Among the dinosaurs is the world’s most complete specimen of the 60-foot-long Galeamopus, and the 35-foot long Tovosaurus, the only one on display in the world.

The museum’s Ice Age Gallery - also renovated - reopened in 2021. The gallery takes visitors on a re-creation of Pleistocene landscapes when glaciers loomed like ice mountains just north of present-day Cincinnati, and mastodons, giant ground sloths and dire wolves roamed the land.

With a few small steps from the Ice Age, visitors can fast-forward 15,000 years or so to the Neil Armstrong Space Exploration Gallery, which celebrates the first steps of a man on the moon and the giant leaps of mankind’s exploration of space.

After Armstrong left NASA, he became a professor at the University of Cincinnati, and the exhibit displays several artifacts – including a moon rock – presented by Armstrong to the museum.

A huge video screen globe (which can portray the earth, moon and other planets) sits at the center of the 360-degree theater, which shows breathtaking, life-sized video from the Apollo 11 moon landing and other space-related fare.

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The gallery also offers several interactive exhibits that seem designed for the younger set, although this oldster found them diverting, too.

Getting through the Antarctic exhibit and natural history museum will easily take several hours. Visitors looking to fill the rest of the day – or weekend – have several more choices at the museum center, including the Cincinnati History Museum, the Children’s Museum, and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center.

Museum center tickets are $17.50 for adults and $13.50 for children ages 3-12, and include admission to all museums except the Holocaust & Humanity Center, which has a $10 ticket charge. The museum center’s OMNIMAX theater movies are also an additional charge.

For more information, visit cincymuseum.org.

Steve Stephens is a freelance travel writer and photographer. Email him at sjstephensjr@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Cincinnati Museum Center offers dinosaur exhibit, space gallery