Enthusiasm for Jurassic World Rebirth, the latest instalment of the dinosaur film franchise, highlights continuing interest in ancient bones.
Tapping into fossil fascination, United Kingdom travel company InsureandGo last month conducted research into more than 200,000 visitor reviews to uncover the world’s highest-rated natural history museums offering dinosaur exhibits.
The rankings were based on the percentage of 4- and 5-star reviews.
The top-ranked dinosaur museum was Drumheller, Canada, with over 97% of its reviews rated four or five stars.
Dunedin’s Tūhura Otago Museum came in second with four- or five-star ratings of more than 96%, closely followed by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History with a fraction over 96%.
Tūhura Otago Museum houses New Zealand’s largest fossil plesiosaur and one of the world’s finest collections of moa remains — a giant flightless bird endemic to New Zealand that went extinct about 600 years ago.
Marketing manager Charlie Buchan said confusion about whether the museum housed dinosaurs may stem from reviews that mention its plesiosaur.
"People tend to think plesiosaurs are dinosaurs because they lived during the same era, but technically they are marine reptiles, not dinosaurs."
Wellington’s Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa also made the list in fifth place, meaning two New Zealand museums were in the top 10.
Its collection includes one of the earliest recognised dinosaur fossils — an iguanodontid tooth discovered in a Sussex quarry that is 132 million to 137 million years old.
InsureandGo communications manager Letitia Smith said people travelled for many different reasons: sampling new dishes, swimming in turquoise waters or exploring unique cultures.
"For many people, that includes visiting a fascinating destination, like a dinosaur museum."
With the new Jurassic Park movie in theatres, it had wanted to highlight the museums that truly captured the awe of natural history, based on real visitor reviews.
To calculate the top 25 museums, InsureandGo conducted independent analysis using publicly available online review data.
It looked at the number of 4- and 5-star reviews for 100 of the most prominent dinosaur and natural history museums globally, comparing those against the total number of reviews to calculate the percentage.
Museums with fewer than 1000 total reviews were excluded to ensure fairness.
If holiday plans took visitors near the listed museums, it was the perfect chance to experience some of the world’s most top-rated prehistory, she said.
