The dinosaurs of Historic Hill do not stay buried for long.
This spring, the Saint Louis Zoo will once again turn its oldest neighborhood into a prehistoric landscape, opening Dinoroarus on Friday, June 19, for a season that runs daily through November 8, 2026. The walk-through attraction places twenty animatronic and stationary dinosaurs in the valley below the Charles H. Hoessle Herpetarium, where they blink, sway, chomp, and — in the case of a pair of Dilophosaurus — spit water at passersby. Between them, the figures carry more than 130 individual animated movements, from independently rolling eyes and swinging tails to full-body sways and water effects.
It is a familiar spectacle by now, but it has not always been this way, and the ground it stands on has a longer story than the dinosaurs suggest.
The first Dinoroarus opened on April 17, 2021, as Emerson Dinoroarus, a temporary exhibit meant to fill a space that had suddenly gone quiet. That space was the Emerson Children's Zoo, which had welcomed its first visitors on June 14, 1969, and spent 51 years as the Zoo's dedicated realm for its youngest guests — a place of goat yards, farm-play areas, playgrounds, and the kind of high-touch, one-on-one animal encounters that defined a generation of St. Louis childhoods. In 1997, the Children's Zoo closed briefly for expansion work, and that same year Emerson Electric stepped forward with a $3 million gift that put the company's name on the gates.
Then came 2020. The Zoo shut its doors for 80 days during the COVID-19 pandemic, and when it reopened, the Children's Zoo could not safely be itself. Its animal shows, indoor building, water bubblers, and interactive areas stayed closed; the goat yard, farm-play area, and playground remained shuttered; keeper and docent handling — the very heart of the experience — was eliminated for the safety of both people and animals. "It was a heart-wrenching decision to close the Children's Zoo, however, safety is our highest priority," said Dr. Jeffrey P. Bonner, then the Zoo's Dana Brown President and CEO. "The Children's Zoo was designed for high-touch and interactive experiences, which is not conducive to a COVID or post-COVID environment."
The animals were relocated elsewhere in the Zoo or to other facilities, though the Tasmanian devils stayed put in their habitat. And into the emptied 3.5 acres came the dinosaurs.
That first season featured 16 groupings of creatures rather than today's 20, alongside a staged fossil dig site. It was an experiment in what to do with a beloved but suddenly unusable corner of the Zoo — and it worked well enough to become a recurring one.
The exhibit returned in later seasons, and in May 2023 the Zoo announced what would come next. On the site of the current Emerson Dinoroarus — formerly the Emerson Children's Zoo — the Zoo would build the Henry A. Jubel Foundation Destination Discovery, a 2.8-acre, $40 million experience for children and families, backed by a $15 million lead gift from the Henry A. Jubel Foundation. "Thanks to an incredibly generous $15 million lead gift from the Henry A. Jubel Foundation, we are able to carry forward the goal of the previous Children's Zoo by providing dynamic experiences for children and families that will inspire a love of animals and learning, but in new and innovative ways," said Dwight Scott, the Zoo's current Dana Brown President & CEO. Construction was set to begin in 2024, with a target public opening in 2026 — and the temporary Dinoroarus was slated to close on November 5, 2023. The Jubel Foundation is named for Henry A. Jubel, who immigrated to St. Louis from Germany; his family, longtime Zoo supporters, saw the project as a way to bring the space back to life. "When the Children's Zoo closed in 2020, as a family we knew we wanted to be a part of bringing this space back to life and in an even better way," said Melissa Jubel Markwort, the foundation's executive director.
That the dinosaurs now roam Historic Hill at all is a piece of good fortune for anyone who loves the Zoo's older bones. Historic Hill is one of the oldest parts of the campus, a winding stroll past the 1904 World's Fair Flight Cage — the enormous free-flight aviary the city bought for $3,500 after the fair — and past the Spanish-inflected architecture of the 1920s: the Bird House, the Primate House, and the Herpetarium whose valley now serves as the dinosaurs' stage. The Zoo itself grew out of that flight cage, formally established in 1916 as the first municipally supported zoo in the world. There is a certain logic to it: the oldest part of the Zoo, built around a relic of 1904, is now the place where the Zoo's youngest visitors go to meet creatures that went extinct millions of years ago.
The 2026 Dinoroarus leans into both the spectacle and the science. The largest animatronic is a Brachiosaurus standing 23 feet tall and weighing about 6,500 pounds. A nearly 40-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex, weighing 5,400 pounds, moves its eyes, neck, arms, and tail independently. The Baryonyx drools — a nod, the Zoo notes, to its fish-catching lifestyle — while the Dilophosaurus can spit water at guests. A Deltadromeus, with nine distinct movements, is presented as an agile runner whose slender hind limbs would have let it outrun larger predators. The species on display span the Late Triassic through the Late Cretaceous, a vast stretch of geological time. Alongside the animatronics, kids can excavate a buried dinosaur skeleton at an interactive fossil dig station, and educational displays explore extinction, evolution, and the connections between dinosaurs and the animals alive today.
Admission to Dinoroarus is $5.95 per person for ages 2 and up, with children 0 to 23 months free; tickets can be bought at Welcome Desks, the Dinoroarus ticket booth, the Guest Relations booth in Lakeside Crossing, or any attraction ticket booth, and an Adventure Pass bundles one-day access to Zoo attractions including the exhibit. The Zoo's general admission, as ever, remains free — a legacy of its municipal founding that makes an afternoon of animatronic roaring an unusually easy outing for any St. Louis family.
There is something fitting about the whole arrangement. The Children's Zoo spent half a century teaching kids to care about living animals; now its former footprint, and the historic hill around it, teaches them about animals that are gone — and about the extinction that took them. The dinosaurs are temporary, as they have always been, and the ground beneath them is slated for reinvention once more. But for the 2026 season, at least, the valley below the Herpetarium belongs to the Mesozoic again, and the roaring is back.