Creating Your Own Tabletop Jurassic Park: A Cheat Guide to Creating a Prehistoric Landscape

Building your own dinosaur mat

Creating your own prehistoric habitat for your dinosaur models and toys is pretty easy and a lot of fun. With the summer holidays approaching, here’s a super dinosaur-themed craft idea to help kids make the most of their free time and maybe even learn something about prehistoric life in the Age of Reptiles.

We have built a series of dinosaur mats with young children to help us, we recommend this exercise for children ages 5 and up, although moms, dads and guardians may have to help with using scissors and the like. Building your own dinosaur land is inexpensive and fun to do, the entire project can be completed in a few hours (allowing time for paint and glue to dry) and can be built at a fraction of the cost of buying a mat game or similar item from a toy store.

Start with the basics: choose a foundation

Get your base first, a solid base is always best as this will help glue objects onto it and create a firm platform for dinosaur models and toys to stand on. Many forts and castles are supplied with a reinforced cardboard square base and are an ideal base for your jungle and dinosaur landscape. A quick visit to a high street charity shop can reward the astute shopper with the purchase of a cheap toy fort or castle base for a few pennies. It doesn’t matter if this base is worn or slightly damaged, it will get painted and have things sticking to it. Anyway, dinosaurs were always churning up the soil and damaging the landscape, scientists even have a special word for this when they find evidence of dinosaur activity in the sediments: “dinoturbation”.

Alternatively, if the base for an old toy castle or fort is not available, simply go back to recycling some cardboard boxes to create the base for your dinosaur land. Take a large cardboard box (one with large sides is preferable), press the base flat, and paint the base green or sand, depending on the type of habitat you want to create.

A way to cheat to get the perfect base for your dinosaur land

To prevent any printing on the cardboard from showing through the paint, cover the entire base with strips of papier-mâché (strips of paper soaked in glue), allow to dry, and then paint. To create the one trick folding dinosaur land, simply take two boxes of the same size and place them side by side, leaving a small gap of about 3cm between them. Cover the entire batch with papier-mâché, including the seam, but only lightly in the seam area. This allows you to incorporate a “hinge” into your model so that the base can be folded up and stowed away when not needed. To avoid having to paint the model with multiple coats of paint to remove all traces of any printing, simply do not use printed material for the last coat of papier-mâché. For example, old photocopy paper (printed on one side only) is ideal for the last layer of papier-mâché. Many dinosaur landscapes have been created by raiding the office recycling paper box.

Creating your landscape

With other strips of newspaper or recycled paper, you can create a landscape so that there are areas of different gradient in your model. Don’t overdo this or there won’t be any level ground to put your models on. You can build higher ground (suggest you do this in the back area of ​​your model), layering thick cardstock strips one on top of the other. Try to produce raised areas that appear a bit square, at least that way you can be sure that the dinosaur toys will stand on top of them. Once you’ve landscaped your base, you can use poster paints to paint the landscape green or sand. It is a good idea to paint a small pond towards the front of your model, since we know that dinosaurs congregated around water holes. Once the paint has dried you can add some details to the base by drawing some tufts of ferns and ponytails. Use a thin green marker for this, just draw stick-like plants for the ponytails or just “v” shapes to represent the ferns.

Dinosaur Landscapes: Adding the First Plants

Surprisingly, if you traveled back in time to the late Cretaceous of North America, you would have recognized much of the vegetation. The dinosaurs you find may seem incongruous in such a familiar wooded setting, but you would have seen dinosaurs drifting in and out of oak, sycamore, maple, and ash forests. Ponds would have been covered in water lilies like lakes today and you can add some water lilies to your dinosaur pond to give it a bit of realism. Take some plain paper or cardstock and color in a small section with dark green paint or crayon. Then, taking some small coins, draw around them to create a series of small circles. Cut them out and make a notch in each circle, a simple triangular shape would suffice and there you have your water lilies waiting to be glued to the surface of your pond. His dinosaur landscape has its first plants, dinosaurs drinking at a waterhole with a lily pad growing in it, a scene straight out of the late Cretaceous.