Do your kids know a T-rex from a velociraptor?

If so there’s a whole afternoon of free family fun planned at University College Cork on Monday, July 18th – and it could be the highlight of their school summer holidays.

UCC is hosting a Fossil Expo from 4pm to 7pm on the day, with loads of activities happening in the Butler Building on the North Mall campus.

There’s a Walk Like a Dinosaur tutorial, a Fossil Colour session and a Fossil Crime Scene as well as plenty of rocks, VR gear and a Fossil Dig zone. The Expo will feature interactive games, puzzles and activities with video games and lots of real fossils for the public to touch and hold.

The Expo coincides with a major international conference on paleontology that is being hosted at UCC from July 18th to 24th, with hundreds of paleontologists due to descend on Cork streets for the week.

Some of these fossil experts will be available at the Expo to answer your questions, so this is a unique opportunity to talk to the experts and bring your rocks and fossils to be identified.

Following the Expo, there will be a free public lecture by world expert Dr Larisa DeSantis on mammal biodiversity and climate change from 8pm in the Aula Maxima on UCC’s Main Campus. You can book your place at the lecture here.