It won't be a massive asteroid that dooms these Seattle dinosaurs. The sky won’t darken into a lethal haze of vaporized rock and soot. But the Pacific Science Center’s animatronic dinosaurs are going away. Forever.
The Mesozoic beasts — museum fixtures since 1990 — are falling apart and are too expensive to repair. The Pacific Science Center is shutting down its permanent dinosaur exhibit and will close for about five weeks this September for facilities maintenance and reorganization.
All but one of the 11 giant reptiles will be decommissioned. The Tyrannosaurus rex will return, though it’s unclear when and how, as it’s currently not functional.
“After nearly 40 years of faithful service, our dinosaur exhibits require increasingly costly maintenance and repairs that exceed their educational value,” said spokesperson Julie O’Mara. “We find the material no longer repairable in its current state.”
The center will be closed to the public from Sept. 2 through Oct. 10 as the staff dismantles the dinos and works on campus maintenance and reorganization. When the Science Center reopens Oct. 11, its courtyard will be freely open to the public (with ticketing booths moved back) and the somewhat underutilized Building 4 will feature a new exhibit about spiders. The Boeing and PACCAR IMAX theaters and laser dome will remain open for evening performances during the closure.
The courtyard’s fiberglass dinosaur sculptures are safe from this extinction event — at least for now. Multimillion-dollar plans for renovations to PacSci’s deteriorated courtyard and leaking pools, announced in 2023, have not been firmed up. But PacSci expects “to remove the dinosaurs from the ponds at a later date as part of the overall project to preserve and restore the courtyard while making it more accessible and sustainable. That timeline is yet to be determined,” said President and CEO Will Daugherty.
As far as the space occupied by the animatronic dinos — some of which are up to 10 feet high and 16 feet wide — O'Mara said only that it will “reopen at a date to be determined with immersive and interactive experiences and programming.”
These upgrades are part of a broader evolution for the 62-year-old Seattle institution, which is facing financial headwinds and an iconic but aging campus.
Earlier this year, Pacific Science Center and Seattle Center announced plans to collaborate, opening the door for more city funding for PacSci. Details have yet to be worked out. What’s sure: Daugherty believes PacSci should establish itself as a portal between downtown and Seattle Center, with a new entrance at the north side and the courtyard open to the public.
He said in March that Pacific Science Center is considering various paths toward a stable fiscal future, including a sale of parts of its property — a handful of buildings around the central courtyard plus its laser dome and two IMAX theaters — as well as long-term building rentals and other partnerships that could help revitalize its campus. Asked whether any sales are pending, Daugherty said PacSci couldn't comment on active discussions.
Daugherty said he's thinking of the dinos as “retiring” as a way to thank them for their service. But it’s time to “make room for new experiences.”
And that means saying goodbye to some longtime friends, including the muscular-jawed allosaurus, the parasaurolophus, with its distinctive nasal crest at the back of its head, and the famed stegosaurus, with its bony plates atop its spine. These dinosaurs lived between 155 and 73 million years ago and are ancient in museum time, too.
They were fabricated in 1986 by Dinamation for the exhibit “Dinosaurs: A Journey Through Time,” made from a combination of silicone and foam latex over steel frames, which degrade over time. The pneumatic movement of the dinosaurs caused their skin to rip within just a few months. These creatures have an expected life span of 15 years, but with chemical patching and sewing, PacSci has kept them alive for nearly 40. Dinamation went out of business and is no longer able to repair or create new dinosaurs, so the Science Center has been doing repairs in-house.
That has required some creativity over the years, including duct tape and rope. O'Mara added that the level of material degradation basically makes the beasts unsalvageable.
Only the steel frames can remain intact. They would have to be entirely rebuilt, and the pneumatic controls replaced," she said. Especially "considering that these specimens are no longer scientifically accurate," it doesn't make sense to hold on to them to rebuild.
PacSci is also decommissioning some of its fossil replicas, including a large replica of a duckbill footprint that can be climbed upon, and a brown-spotted "fossilized" triceratops tooth. (It is keeping a few "salvageable replicas, including a T. rex skeletal foot and a hand-cranked skull.)
The Science Center staff is looking into ways to appropriately send off the big, beloved beasts — mark your calendar for a 21-plus “Farewell, Dinos” party at 7 p.m. on Aug 21 — and that could include selling, raffling or donating parts or entire dinosaurs. A major caveat: Most are not in good enough condition to be sold or even moved, and they’re very expensive to transport. Only the Allosaurus is in “sellable” condition, per O’Mara.
So, if you ever wanted to adopt an animatronic theropod from the Late Jurassic that weighs close to 1000 pounds, this is your chance to pounce.
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