The Plant Garden hosts the lantern trail Jurassic in the process of Enlightenment until Friday January 19, 2024. For the sixth edition, the festival transforms the park into a real open-air museum and offers a trip into the past to explore the mysteries of the Jurassic period. At nightfall, the public puts themselves in the shoes of a paleontologist and admires the animals and plants that populated our planet in the Jurassic era, 200 million years ago.
The sixth edition of festival On the way to illumination is an unmissable event at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025. The walk under the stars is magical because monumental creatures come to life through majestic light sculptures. After highlighting endangered species in 2018, the oceans in 2019, the evolution of life in 2021, tiny wildlife in 2022 and the jungle in 2023, the National Museum of Natural History du Jardin des Plantes sets out to discover the biodiversity of the Jurassic for this new edition.
This immersive tour, offered to visitors, features characteristic, spectacular and strange species from the collections of Sylvain Charbonnier's teams from the research laboratory. The species are presented in five tables, some of which are little known: marine reptiles; life-size land and flying dinosaurs; the first mammals of which we find fossilized specimens in the Paleontology and Anatomy Gallery of the Jardin des Plantes.
This journey through time of 200 million years passes through the great depths of the ocean, through marshy environments, through green valleys at the heart of the age of dinosaurs. During the Jurassic, the continents continued their separation and most marine organisms took advantage of the opening of sea routes to disperse across the planet; pterosaurs begin to dominate the air; the first birds appear; mammals and plants are experiencing strong diversification…
In the Lower Jurassic, At a depth of 200 meters in the open sea, impressive marine reptiles swim: plesiosaurs with their long graceful necks, cousins of crocodiles, and ichthyosaurs. In Europe, the sea is deep and rich in marine reptiles, where the ichthyosaur lives, a marine reptile that has the profile of a dolphin but is not a mammal. This animal with big eyes has a size of around one and a half meters, reaching 4 meters for the largest. There are also ammonites and belemnites as well as radiolarians, these microorganisms with astonishing shapes that evolve with the currents.
Middle Jurassic in the depths of the ocean, where pressure, cold and darkness are omnipresent, animals are adapted to extreme conditions; octopuses and jellyfish produce their own light by bioluminescence. Underwater oases are formed with many diverse organisms including thylacocephalus, these kinds of crustaceans with articulated legs and enormous eyes.
In the Upper Jurassic, it 150 million years ago, At the location of our current Europe made of white sand beaches and small archipelagos, dinosaurs lived on dry land. Pterosaurs, these flying reptiles with a wingspan of one and a half meters with their beak-shaped mandible, dominated the sky with flying feathered dinosaurs, such as Archaeopteryx, which move in the air.
Inland, the valley is wooded, crossed by a river, impressive dinosaurs and the lush vegetation is made up of numerous ferns, cycads, ginkgoes and conifers. There are also bennettitales (now extinct): medium-sized plants with the appearance of a shrub or palm tree.
The journey ends 140 million years ago: the Jurassic gives way to the Cretaceous. The fragmentation of the continents leads to the appearance of the South Atlantic which separates South America from Africa. The future France is at the heart of a swamp where exotic biodiversity flourishes: crocodiles, turtles, fish, amphibians and mammals. Large herds of ornithomimosaurs, thuriasaurs, and giant dinosaurs live in dense forests. There are also small feathered dinosaurs that aren't just used for flying! They were used to regulate the temperature. Their height is two meters at the maximum withers. The exhibition represents them to scale and of all sizes: young people, adults, females and males.
The Paris Plant Garden, formerly called the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants, was created in May 1635 by decision of the King of France Louis XIII (1601-1643), with the support of his doctor Guy de la Brosse (1586-1641) who was also a botanist. He wanted to make it a garden intended for the training of future doctors and apothecaries. Until the French Revolution, professors occupied three positions: botany, anatomy and chemistry. The writer and botanist Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) was appointed steward of the garden in 1791; he creates the menagerie. In 1793, the Convention created the Natural History Museum.
In the 19th century the following were built: the mineralogy and geology gallery from 1833 to 1841; the zoology gallery from 1877 to 1889, which was restored in the 20th century between 1991 and 1994; the gallery of paleontology and comparative anatomy from 1892 to 1898. The Jardin des Plantes today occupies thirty hectares.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Jardin des Plantes, Place Valhubert, 75005 Paris
Prices: From €15 to €18 / Tribe package available / Free for children under 3 years old.
Schedules :
Outside school holidays: open Wednesday to Sunday, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. (last entry: 9 p.m.)
School holidays: open every evening from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. (including December 25 and 31, 2024 and December 1is January 2025)
