5 travel spots where you can discover the dinosaurs of the past

The scarily well-rendered CGI brutes on screen are more lifelike than in their last outing, 26 years ago, but still nothing beats the real thing – walking where T rex once stomped, or staring into the fossilised face of a triceratops or two.

And it’s surprisingly easy to do: here are five prehistoric holiday hotspots for which the word “roarsome” was (nearly) invented...

Dinosaur Provincial Park – Alberta, Canada

Alberta’s Badlands look like someone let a T rex loose on a giant chocolate cake: all jagged ridges and sticky, swirled mudstone. This Unesco World Heritage Site (albertaparks. ca/dinosaur) has coughed up more than 50 dinosaur species – even casual hikers can trip over fossils.

The park offers guided fossil safaris, where palaeontologists let you dig up 75-million-year-old bones. You can’t keep them, but you’ll leave with the kind of smug dinner-party anecdote no one can top. (“Oh, you went to the Maldives again? I found a hadrosaur femur.”)

Base yourself in nearby Drumheller, home of the excellent Royal Tyrrell Museum (tyrrellmuseum.com), where the exhibits look like Hollywood sets but come with scientific credentials.

Request a brochure and get inspiration for your next holiday

Lark Quarry – Queensland, Australia

When the new Jurassic World film hits cinemas in July, it will be hard-pushed to offer more drama than Lark Quarry – home to the world’s only recorded dinosaur stampede.

Here in the Queensland outback, one day about 95 million years ago, 150 tiny two-legged dinos were ambushed by a predator – and panicked, leaving behind over 3,000 footprints in the mud. That mud hardened, time passed and now it’s like standing on an ancient film still.

The on-site interpretive centre (dinosaurtrackways.com.au) is brilliantly informative, but it’s the footprints themselves – caught mid-sprint, mid-squabble – that bring the moment alive. It’s a kinetic, chaotic little scene frozen forever, like Pompeii with claws. Getting there takes effort (fly to Longreach or Winton, then brace yourself for serious road-tripping), but that’s time travel for you…

Dinosaur National Monument – Utah/Colorado, USA

Straddling the Utah-Colorado border like an argentinosaurus, Dinosaur National Monument is practically a greatest hits album of prehistoric life (nps.gov/dino). This national park’s star attraction is Quarry Exhibit Hall, where you can see more than 1,500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the cliff face: stegosaurus, allosaurus, diplodocus – the Jurassic gang’s all here.

But this is only the epicentre of the area’s ancient action: cruise down Route 191 and you’ll pass Utah’s Prehistoric Museum, Jurassic National Monument and slightly less serious Moab Giants (where lifesize model dinos grimace unconvincingly at visitors) before arriving at Moab itself, sandwiched between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks.

The jaw-loosening geology at these two would be worth the trip alone, but here the remains are so plentiful they don’t even get fenced off from the public – you can walk right up and step literally in the footprints of dinosaurs.

Solnhofen – Bavaria, Germany

Solnhofen might not be a household name, but it should be – because it’s where archaeopteryx, the world’s most famous almost-bird, was discovered. This delicate, foot-long feathered fossil bridged the gap between dinosaurs and modern birds, and it’s still turning palaeontological heads over 150 years later.

The local limestone is absurdly good at preserving things, capturing not just bones but feathers, fish and soft tissue with photographic clarity. The Jura Museum down the road in Eichstätt (https://snsb. de/en/jura-museum-eichstaett/) and Munich’s natural history collections have the best displays, but some nearby quarries let you do your own digging.

Fair warning: you’re more likely to find a fossil fish than a flying dinosaur – but stranger things have evidently happened in Solnhofen. Base yourself in Eichstätt, too: it’s a lovely old town with a strange and splendidly named old castle – Willibaldsburg – in the middle.

The Bendricks – Barry, South Wales

Proof that you don’t have to cross continents to find dino magic, Bendricks Bay (beside Barry, near Cardiff) is a low-key legend. Here, at low tide, you can walk among hundreds of Triassic era dinosaur footprints – some of the best preserved in the UK.

There’s something brilliantly British about the whole thing: modest signage, a car park that’s half mud, and no entry fee in sight. But follow the shoreline footpath and you’ll soon spot the three-toed prints, just sitting there on the flat rock like they were made last week.

Even better? You’re only five minutes from a decent chip shop and a beachside pub (not to mention the Barry Island seafront immortalised in Gavin & Stacey). It’s like you’ve gone back 220 million years, but with scampi fries and a nice pint of Brains bitter.

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Walking with Dinosaurs begins on Sunday 25th May at 6:25pm on BBC One and iPlayer.

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