Orville and Wilbur Wright may have been the first to achieve human flight, but a new exhibit at Grand Rapids Public Museum features creatures that beat them to it by a couple hundred million years.
The Grand Rapids Public Museum recently opened a brand new exhibit, Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs, giving visitors a hands-on experience with prehistoric creatures that flew with the dinosaurs.
Close relatives of dinosaurs, pterosaurs are the first back-boned animals to evolve powered flight, and the only vertebrates to develop this ability besides birds and bats. For as long as dinosaurs walked the Earth, pterosaurs ruled the skies. They ranged from the size of a sparrow to that of a two-seater plane.
Visitors can participate in engaging activities like analyzing bone fragments, exploring dozens of casts of rare fossils, coming face-to-face with life-size models of various species of pterosaurs, experimenting with the principles of pterosaur aerodynamics in an interactive, virtual wind tunnel, and more.
The Pterosaurs exhibit will be included with general admission to the Museum and is free for Museum members.
To learn more or to purchase tickets in advance, visit grpm.org.
