The Lehi museum with the world's only known Tanycolagreus

The Mountain America Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi has a Tanycolagreus, and the museum describes it as the world's only known one. That makes the list of places to see one a short list. You will find it in Need for Speed, the newest chapter of Jurassic Hall, along with a remarkably complete adult Allosaurus and a newly arrived Ceratosaurus.

The exhibit is built around what made these predators some of the most successful hunters of their time. There are authentic fossils, magnifiers for comparing dinosaur teeth, a station for making your own paleoart, and digital exhibits that bring Jurassic hunters to life through movement, sound, and animation.

The museum opened in 2000 as a travel-through-time dinosaur walk in a 30,000-square-foot venue. A group of Utah paleontologists approached Thanksgiving Point with the idea of building a world-class dinosaur museum, and together they planned and assembled the exhibits. The goal was to take collections out of cases and put them into an immersive environment. Thanksgiving Point itself dates to 1995, when Alan Ashton gave farmland in Lehi to his wife, Karen Jackman Ashton, on Valentine's Day.

The museum has 60 complete dinosaur skeletons, which it says makes it one of the world's largest displays of mounted dinosaurs. It also has more than 50 hands-on exhibits, including an Erosion Table and a Quarry Dig. A newer sauropods exhibit lets you measure the size of sauropod eggs and compare your height to the dinosaurs themselves, a comparison that goes about how you would expect. In the lobby, a mounted Nanosaurus flees from a Torvosaurus.

At the Paleo Studio you use the same tools as real paleontologists to excavate an Eocene fossil and take the specimen home. Geode cracking works on a simpler principle: you pick a geode, put it in the cracking machine, and find out what crystal is inside. There is also an Alligator Gar, which the museum notes is sometimes called a living fossil because scientists can trace the species in the fossil record back 100 million years.

All admission is time-ticketed with limited availability, and the museum asks that you buy in advance. The address is 2929 N Thanksgiving Way. Once inside, you can watch paleontologists and volunteers unearth a 150-million-year-old Barosaurus.