The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center will be open for special holiday hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Memorial Day, May 30, 2022, to celebrate the final day of its Tiny Titans: Dinosaur Eggs and Babies exhibit. This will be your last chance to experience the exhibit before it is packed up and shipped out.
This remarkable, hands-on exhibition offers an astounding array of authentic dinosaur eggs and nests collected from all across the globe, in addition to great hands-on play experiences! Kids can dig for eggs, dress up like a parent dinosaur to brood their nest and feel the texture of dinosaur eggs. Cute babies and fun dinosaur facts will keep the whole family playing and learning.
Regular admission applies, which is $9 for children and adults, $8 for seniors and free for infants under 12 months and Discovery Center members. Admission also lets you play all day at the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center, with more than 15,000 square feet of indoor educational exhibits exploring science, careers, art, building and more, plus a 4.5-acre certified Nature Explore Outdoor Classroom.
Tiny Titans is part of Topeka Dino Days, a communitywide dinosaur exhibition that includes Dinosaurs Alive at the nearby Topeka Zoo (open through June 30) and Sue: The T-Rex Experience at the Great Overland Station (now closed). It also includes the Topeka Dino Days Base Camp at the Topeka Visitors Center, which closes on Memorial Day, as well.
The exhibit has been a great attraction for the Discovery Center, and was vital in helping attract a record single-day attendance of 1,152 visitors on March 17, 2022, during Topeka’s spring break week.
The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center got a helping hand from a great group of volunteers from the Evergy Green Team on Tuesday, March 29.
The volunteers spent several hours cutting down problematic trees, laying mulch at the Chinese New Years Pavilion and dragon sculpture, clearing excessive brush and removing rocks, wood beams and other debris to make the Discovery Center’s Certified “Nature Explore” Outdoor Classroom a safe, visually appealing area for children and their families to learn, grow and play.
Evergy has been a big supporter of the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center for many years. It provided considerable funding and volunteers for a project that involved making the Discovery Center’s pond and stream more interactive and safe, helped oversee a recent prescribed burn of the Discovery Center’s prairie restoration habitat, constructed the Discovery Center’s original Epic Sandbox in 2017 and has donated to help fund many of the Discovery Center’s great educational programs.
The Green Team itself is a group of employees and retiree volunteers that has taken on environmental projects across Kansas and Missouri since 1989. The team completes 50 to 70 projects per year, mostly on weekends and evenings, according to its website. The Green Team collaborates with conservation groups, agencies and schools in enhancing and fostering an understanding of the Kansas and Missouri environment, as well as improving natural habitats and helping provide access to important environmental areas.
Kansas Children’s Discovery Center offers high-quality, interactive experiences to inspire a lifelong love of learning for every child. Volunteers support our mission by creating these memorable experiences for every family that walks through our doors. Volunteers engage children in fun, educational activities, pitch in at special events, maintain our outdoor space and keep exhibit areas ready for play. If your organization is interested in a fun volunteer day at the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center, call our volunteer coordinator at (785) 783-8300. We have indoor and outdoor projects for any size group.
Thank you, Evergy Green Team!
MORE VOLUNTEER NEWS: Read more about future educators from TCALC volunteering their time here.
View more photos from Evergy Green Team’s day of volunteering!
An annual sunflower photographed during the winter.
Prairie land, at one time the world’s largest ecosystem, once sprawled across North America.
An ocean of grass stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River, with a complex ecosystem that was equally as vast.
Today, the 170 million-acre span that was once tallgrass prairie has dwindled down to an estimated 4% of its original territory, with the largest remaining unplowed area made up of the Flint Hills – a region stretching from Nebraska to Oklahoma, with Kansas smack dab in the middle.
To teach kids and adults the importance of this endangered, rapidly shrinking land mass, the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center created its own native prairie grass and wildflower habitat. The prairie area runs between the Discovery Center’s parking lot and S.W. 10th Street, complete with native prairie grasses and wildflowers making their own little ecosystem.
The prairie will be in focus Dec. 22 and 29, when the Discovery Center will offer guided tours beginning at 4 p.m. each day. Regular admission applies, which is $9 for children and adults, $8 for seniors and free for infants under 12 months and Discovery Center members. Admission also lets you play all day at the Discovery Center.
The Discovery Center’s prairie sees a wide variety of wildlife, including pollinators such as monarch butterflies, native bees and hummingbirds, as well as various types of birds, turtles, toads, lizards and small mammals such as rabbits.
Ornate box turtle | Photo by Rachael Rost, Topeka Zoo
The Discovery Center is tentatively planning to do a prescribed burn on the prairie area in February. Burns are a natural process for helping control unwanted plant growth, called fuel, from invasive species such as bush honeysuckle or tree saplings, along with fertilizing the soil and promoting regeneration and species diversity. It also opens up space with the taller plants out of the way for sunlight to hit the smaller vegetation as it takes root. Some seeds only germinate under the presence of fire and other disturbances.
Vivien Smith, the Discovery Center’s volunteer prairie manager, said she plans to plant more pollinator species after the burn to help attract butterflies and other pollinators to the area.
In addition to its prairie area, the Discovery Center encourages outdoor play for all children and includes 4.5 acres of outdoor space available for play. The outdoor play area has earned national recognition as a Certified Nature Explore Classroom from the Nature Explore program and includes a treehouse, pirate ship, bikes and trikes, a pond and stream, child-friendly zipline, music garden, texture kitchen, rock climbing area and other fun play spaces.
Value of the tallgrass prairie
Red-tailed hawk | Photo by Kathleen Otto, The Topeka Zoo
Some of the native plants species that grow in the tallgrass prairie ecosystem include big bluestem and different kinds of milkweed such as butterfly weed, as well as white and purple prairie clover, annual sunflowers, buffalo grass, wild indigo, asters, golden rods and wild bergamot, also known as beebalm.
Native animals to the tallgrass prairie ecosystem include hundreds of species of birds, though they have seen a massive decline in population in recent years, as well as dozens of species of reptiles, amphibians and mammals. Native mammals to the system include white-tailed deer, American bison, prairie dogs, white-tailed jackrabbits, red foxes and North American badgers. Pronghorn antelope, elk, black bears and mountain lions are also considered native to the ecosystem, though they are locally extirpated – forced out by human presence and overhunting. The black-footed ferret, an endangered species, is another indigenous mammal to the tallgrass prairie.
Bird species such as burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks and greater prairie chickens also called the tallgrass prairie home, as do reptiles and amphibians such as the Texas horned lizard, bullsnake and great plains toad.
The streams and rivers that cut through the tallgrass prairie land are home to a variety of interesting native fish, as well, including the alligator gar, paddlefish and the Topeka shiner, an endangered minnow that is named after the capital city of Kansas. Topeka shiners were once found in the Shunganunga Creek before disappearing in the 1950s.
More those looking to get an even more close-up look at some of the prairie’s native critters, the Topeka Zoo houses a variety of prairie reptile species, including a western hognose snake, prairie kingsnake, ornate box turtle, 3-toed box turtle, corn snake and black rat snake, according to Rachael Rost, the zoo’s education program manager.
Other prairie species the zoo has on hand include a Virginia opossum and striped skunk, as well as a turkey vulture, screech owl, Great Horned owl and a red-tail hawk named Dane, pictured above.
