Head back to dino-school before seeing Jurassic World

 What will blow up the box office this summer? Dino might.

...okay, fine, we're sorry. The point is that Jurassic World, the fourth movie in the Jurassic Park franchise, is going to be monstrously successful this weekend. Nearly every child of a certain age became obsessed with dinosaurs at the same time because of Jurassic Park. In fact, we're certain you can still name your favorite dinosaur.

We want to stoke that excitement again. So in addition to promoting our Jurassic Park movie collection (specifically the bonus disc that came with the trilogy box set, DVD 4904), we want to talk about our educational dinosaur videos. A catalog search turns up over fifty dinosaur-related items in our collection; here are a few highlights to get your dino-juices flowing.

(All these videos are available to watch streaming via the library catalog.)

• Dino Death Trap: Take a close look at a Pompeii-type graveyard of dinosaur species trapped in lava – and well-preserved!
• Dino Revolution: This video from 2000 sheds light on then-recent discoveries linking dinosaurs to birds
• How to Build a Dinosaur: Watch up-close as scientists piece together dinosaur skeletons and reveal how they work on these reconstructions.
• Reconstructing T-Rex: A 2009 documentary about recent discoveries about everyone's favorite giant terrifying apex predator.
• Dino Math: So this one isn't really about dinosaurs, but it has kids solving math problems with dinosaur manipulatives. We figured this would bring back some good memories.

Early reviews indicate that Jurassic World is exciting but not quite as inspiring as the original. We hope this doesn't prevent a new generation of kids from having their own overly-excited-about-dinosaurs phase. Luckily, we have educational dinosaur content like the videos above the carry the torch.