Huge T-Rex brings ‘wow factor’ to museum pop-up exhibition

Monday, 10 July 2023

The life-sized cast of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered is part of the Six Extinctions exhibition opening on Friday at the Canterbury Museum pop-up at the Centre of Contemporary Art.

A cast of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found is taking up residence in a Canterbury Museum pop-up exhibition, alongside other carnivorous beasts.

But the deadly predators aren’t the only historical items set to draw in the crowds - some of the museum’s visitor favourites will also be back on display after being away from the public eye since it closed its doors in April for a five year redevelopment.

The pop-up Canterbury Museum will remain at CoCA for the next five years while the Rolleston Ave site undergoes a $205m revamp.

The Six Extinctions exhibition, which opens on Friday during Matariki and runs until December 3, features the 13m Tyrannosaurus rex and a number of other sharp-toothed creatures from each geological period, including Dunkleosteus, a giant armoured fish that terrorised the seas, Inostrancevia, a tiger-sized beast, and Postosuchus, a giant carnivorous reptile.

The beasts, hundreds of millions of years old, highlight the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history, and the sixth and current extinction crisis, climate change - the first to be caused by a single species, humans.

The giants will take over the first floor of Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) Toi Moroki, sharing a space with around 80 objects from the museum’s Rolleston Ave displays.

The pop-up Canterbury Museum will remain at CoCA for the next five years while the Rolleston Ave site undergoes a $205m, revamp which involves demolishing parts of the building built between the 1950s and 1990s.

The beloved horse, part of a scene depicting life on a Christchurch street in the 1800s, is just one of the visitor favourites returning to the Canterbury Museum pop-up.

Canterbury Museum acting director Sarah Murray said distilling the essence of the much-loved Christchurch attraction into less than 100 objects had been challenging.

“We’ve chosen to display taonga which represent the breadth and depth of the collection, ranging from a group taxidermied animals through to historic objects from the Antarctic, Mountfort and Early Settlers galleries.”

Highly regarded Māori and Pasifika objects can also be seen, she said, “alongside the return of two firm visitor favourites, the horse from the Christchurch street and Ivan Mauger’s gold bike”.

The bust of Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen, pictured with museum curatorial lead technician, Natasha Bonham-Carter, is also making a comeback.

But it’s the life-sized T-Rex that will give the pop-up museum the “wow factor,” she said.

“We think children will love it.

“But it will also appeal to a wider audience as it deals with the topical issue of climate change and with the evolution of life on Earth.”

The free family-friendly exhibition created by Gondwana Studios premiered last year at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.

It takes visitors back 485 million years and looks at the available evidence of previous mass extinctions, and shows how climate has changed in the past and the effect it had on life.

It also explains what caused the extinctions, what became extinct and how these events shaped the world as we know it.