About the exhibition
Experience the sheer size of the giants of the Mesozoic era!
The dinosaurs on display at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum did not all live at the same time. The age of the dinosaurs—the Mesozoic era—is divided into three periods: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The oldest and only representative of the Triassic period in our exhibition is the Plateosaurus.
The following epoch—the Jurassic period—saw the emergence of giant herbivorous sauropods such as the imposing long-necked Diplodocus in the center of the dinosaur hall. But some of these giants could grow even larger, as our Supersaurus leg shows. These four-legged giants lived around 150 million years ago. The most recent period of the Mesozoic era – the Cretaceous period – is characterized by the greatest diversity of dinosaur species. The famous Tyrannosaurus and our heraldic animal, the three-horned dinosaur Triceratops, lived during this period.
The pterosaurs on display, such as the Quetzalcoatlus, also date back to the Cretaceous period, which ended over 66 million years ago with a mass extinction event.