The Dinoplagne park opened this week in Ain, an hour's drive from Lyon.
Built around the exceptional discovery in 2009 of 115 dinosaur footprints, it offers young and old alike a fun and instructive dive into the heart of the Jurassic, 150 million years ago.
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How about taking advantage of the summer to explore dinosaurs? In Plagne, one hour from Lyon, a park called Dinoplagne opened its doors on Thursday. It presents to the public a hundred of dinosaur footprints, 150 million years old. They were discovered by chance 12 years ago, preserved intact in the limestone rock.
These traces were sleeping at an altitude of 800 meters, in the woods.
They belong to a sauropod, a giant, herbivorous dinosaur, which lived in an environment radically different from that of today, explains Jean-Pierre Fillon, who led the Dinoplagne project.
"We were by the sea, in a landscape that resembled that of the Bahamas, with lagoons, a blue ocean, coral reefs and there, these animals which wandered, like the titanosaurs which left traces here."
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"It was better not to be in its path"
After three years of excavations, 115 footprints have been unearthed, one meter in diameter for the largest.
"We can see the five fingers of the leg very well. It is a dinosaur of the diplodocus family. This one is a small one, it weighs only 40 tons", smiles Jean-Pierre Fillon.
"A long neck, a small head, a relatively narrow body despite everything and a gigantic tail which was to be used to hunt predators come to bother him", he sums up.
"It was better not to get in its way."
Almost unique in the world, these footprints are the occasion for a journey to the heart of the Jurassic, 150 million years ago. © Jean-Luc Boujon for Europe 1.
And we understand it even better with the augmented reality glasses that transport you in the middle of these giants. Something to delight children, while educating them. Because this fun space was designed with scientists enthusiastic about this discovery that is almost unique in the world.