Make No Bones About It, Liberty Science Center Will Go to the Dinosaurs On May 22

JERSEY CITY, N.J., May 17, 2021 – For generations, dinosaurs have loomed large in the public imagination. Now, Liberty Science Center guests will be able to visit a life-size Tyrannosaurus rexSUE: The T. rex Experience on May 22, LSC will go full prehistoric as summer approaches.

This interactive, engaging, and hands-on exhibit features the exact replica of SUE’s skeleton, measuring 40 feet from snout to tail, and 13 feet tall at the hip. Guests can explore the sights, sounds, and smells of SUE's world in high-tech simulations. The exhibit will feature the latest scientific discoveries in the paleontology field while also displaying a fleshed-out replica of a T. rex battling an Edmontosaurus.

“Liberty Science Center likes to go big with its exhibits, but SUE is truly gigantic,” said Paul Hoffman, President and CEO. “In fact, the T. rex is about 10 times longer than our average guest is tall. That sheer size is one of the reasons people have always been fascinated with dinosaur fossils and why we anticipate that SUE will be a huge attraction, literally and figuratively.”

SUE is named after the explorer who discovered the Tyrannosaurus rex, Sue Hendrickson. She discovered the dinosaur in 1990 during a commercial excavation trip north of Faith, South Dakota. During her trip, Hendrickson spotted a few large vertebrae projecting out of the ground and continued to search beneath the surface. It took six people and 17 days to extract the dinosaur’s bones from the ground where SUE was discovered.

In addition to the massive skeleton, guests can immerse themselves in SUE’s world through a giant floor-to-ceiling screen showing realistic animations of SUE interacting with other prehistoric animals. There will be stations giving visitors a chance to smell prehistoric plants, and even scientists’ best guess of how SUE’s breath would have smelled. The experience includes a multimedia light show illuminating details of SUE’s skeleton, touchable bronze casts of some of SUE’s bones, and a station where visitors can hear and feel the deep, low rumbling of SUE’s growl.

With new technologies and interactive experiences that make SUE’s world come alive, this exhibition highlights new scientific discoveries about T. rex in general and SUE in particular.

While SUE was first found in 1990, scientists are learning new things about the T. rex every day, due in large part to SUE’s incredibly well-preserved bones. The SUE exhibition includes all the latest scientific updates as well as an extra set of bones that scientists weren’t quite sure how to position when SUE was first found. These bones, called gastralia, are “belly ribs” that stretched across the abdomen and helped it breathe. They make SUE look more ferocious than ever before.

To learn more and purchase tickets online, please visit LSC.org.

About Liberty Science Center
Liberty Science Center (LSC.org) is a 300,000-square-foot not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers and bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology to learners of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, live simulcast surgeries, a tornado-force wind simulator, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs. More than 250,000 students visit the Science Center each year, and tens of thousands more participate in the Center’s off-site and online programs. Welcoming more than 750,000 visitors annually, LSC is the largest interactive science center in the NYC-NJ metropolitan area.