The Dinosaur Isle gets its own museum

Britain's second museum dedicated to dinosaurs will open on Friday on the Isle of Wight, a fruitful hunting ground for palaeontologists. The exhibition in Sandown will show robotic reconstructions of giant creatures wiped out 65 million years ago, and try to recreate sights, sounds and smells of the island in the Jurassic age.

Britain's second museum dedicated to dinosaurs will open on Friday on the Isle of Wight, a fruitful hunting ground for palaeontologists. The exhibition in Sandown will show robotic reconstructions of giant creatures wiped out 65 million years ago, and try to recreate sights, sounds and smells of the island in the Jurassic age.

Leading figures in the study of fossil animals will gather for the inauguration of the Dinosaur Isle Museum, a glass-and-steel structure, built with a £2.7m lottery grant, which resembles one of the giant pterodactyls that dominated the skies of the south coast 146 million years ago.

The first dinosaur museum opened in Dorchester, Dorset, nearly 20 years ago and was voted European Museum of the Year in 1986. The new museum will house 1,000 exhibits from collections curated by the local council. Curators have also developed "fleshed" replicas and moving, or "animatronic", versions of the long-necked dinosaur, the sauropod, and the herbivorous hyspilophodon.