Create your own Table Top Jurassic Park!
Building your own dinosaur play scene or playmat with your dinosaur obsessed children is very straight forward and with a few items of household rubbish such as old newspapers, cardboard, leftover paint and egg boxes you can soon create your very own dinosaur diorama, the perfect setting for your child's dinosaur toys and models.
Cutting Bits
Creating the landscape using cardboard, an old base from a toy fort or castle is quite simple but often parents ask us about the sort of plants they should be putting into their playmat landscape. Fortunately, help is at hand and we offer a few suggestions to help Mums and Dads theme up a dinosaur playmat without too much effort or expense.
Making Model Bushes, Trees and Plants for your Dinosaur Playmat or Diorama
Making the vegetation for a Jurassic Park style playmat is quite easy and best of all youngsters can get involved helping to make the plants, trees and bushes that their herbivorous toy dinosaurs can feed on. However, be careful when it comes to using scissors, make sure children are well supervised and we would recommend putting down some sheets of newspaper to protect kitchen work surfaces or the table top where you are working as some paint may get split as young children can become a little over eager to complete their prehistoric plants.
First some Bushes
Taking some brown crepe paper, brown paper (even newspaper painted brown looks fine), crumple this up into a small ball. If you have any old ping pong balls even better. Simply paint the balls brown and these can be the bases for cycad plants. Cycads are fern-like plants that evolved in the Palaeozoic, thrived during the time of the Dinosaurs (Mesozoic), being the staple diet of many herbivores such as Stegosaurus and they still survive today. They are palm-like seed plants with massive, thick trunk-like stems and a crown of fern-like leaves. The tree-fern Dicksonia is a popular garden plant, it makes a spectacular focal point in any flora display, so no dinosaur playmat would be complete without a few of these bizarre looking plants.
Once the cycad bases are completed, take some green card and cut out fronds that taper to a point (make them look like palm fronds). When creating the crown of ferns for you cycad, I find it best to take a piece of green card or green paper, cut a triangle shape out and then cut little uneven nicks along the sides to create the frond effect. Make different sized leaves and then simply stick them to the top of your cycad base using glue or tape. Arrange the fronds in a circular pattern around the top of your cycad.
Making a Cycad - cheat's tip
Here's a quick cheat for making cycad plants. Use the bottom of egg boxes to make the base for a cycad. Each cardboard egg holder can be cut out and painted brown. The flat base makes and ideal top to glue your green fern fronds to.
Cheap Bushes - Adding more Vegetation
You can create small bushes by cutting up pieces of kitchen sponge (often these sponges are green, which is very convenient). Use a new sponge, cheap ones work just as well as expensive brands and cut out irregular lumps. Stick them down with glue around your model. Toy shops that sell model railway accessories can supply bags of dyed lichen and moss that can be used as well to up "green up" your dinosaur playmat.
A Model Rockery for your Dinosaur Playmat
Take some pebbles from the garden, give them a good wash and build up your own model rockery. We found that smooth pebbles were the best ones to use. We purchased some from a local florist, along with some plastic fronds and florist oasis so that we could stand up a few twigs and fir tree fronds in our landscape. Stick the pebbles together with strong glue or tape and place the pieces of sponge amongst them to make a rocky landscape.
Some dinosaurs would have sunned themselves on rocks like these or used them as observation posts so that they could look out for prey.
Now the Trees
If you had been able to go for a walk in the late Cretaceous of North America for example, you would have been surprised at how familiar the vegetation was. You would have seen oaks, maples, poplars and many other types of "modern" trees. Model trees purchased from a toy shop, especially the conifers work fine in your dinosaur landscape, but you can make your own and it is more fun.
Tree ferns would make an excellent accompaniment to the cycads, these plants were common in the age of reptiles and very simple to make. Lay three sheets of thin, green card on top of each other and then roll them up tightly, using the short side to make a tube. Tape in the middle to secure your tube. With a pair of scissors, carefully cut one end of the roll or tube into strips, about six inches up. Then, taking care, twist and pull this end up to make the tree longer. The strips will gradually curl down to form the foliage for the tree. Make a base for the tree to stand on using a piece of coloured card, weight the base with sticky tack or a coin to make the tree stand upright. Make different sized trees and use different coloured card to make a grove and place them on the edges and towards the back of your model (biggest trees at the back), to create the impression of a clearing in the forest.
The Background - Completing the Scene
Add a backdrop to your dinosaur play mat. Using a large piece of white card get the children to draw or paint a background for your model. Don't forget to draw in some distant volcanoes, a prehistoric scene is not complete without a view volcanoes!
Build a Dinosaur Nest!
Taking the lid from a washed out jam jar or other kitchen jar, cover this in a thin layer of paper mache so that you have a rough dish shape, then line it with paper fronds, or even small pieces from a garden fir tree (washed and dried). You now have a dinosaur nest to place into your diorama, simply stick the base to your model using tape. To make some dinosaur eggs take bits of white paper or crepe paper and roll them into balls to create little dinosaur eggs for your dinosaur nest. Scientists think that all dinosaurs laid eggs, so having a nest in your play scene is quite authentic.
The Finishing Touches
Finally the finishing touches to complete your prehistoric scene. Using a black marker pen you can add some details to your model. More tufts of vegetation, even grass as some types of grass did evolve in the Cretaceous. Perhaps you could draw a set of three-toed dinosaur footprints making a trackway across your play set. Now all you need to do is to add your dinosaur models and toys and your little ones have a fun and inexpensive dinosaur playmat to create their own dinosaur adventures.