Texas boasts two dinosaur "encounters."

Indoors

The Dallas Museum of Nature and Science's "Texas Dinosaur – Fossil Dig" exhibit shows how specimens found in a major paleontological project in Big Bend National Park make their way to this and other museums and are studied and prepared in the lab. The Dallas museum, Big Bend National Park and the University of Texas-Dallas are partners in excavating a large concentration of Alamosaurus bones. The Imax Theater is showing Dinosaurs Alive through Friday.

Museum of Nature and Science, 3535 Grand Ave. and 1318 S. Second Ave. (Fair Park); 214-428-5555; www.natureandscience.org. Tickets: $8.75, adults; $7.75, ages 12-18, 62-plus and students older than 18 with I.D.; $5.50, ages 3-18. Imax: $7, adults; $6, others.

Outdoors

Dinosaur Valley State Park, northwest of Glen Rose, boasts some of the world's best-preserved dinosaur tracks. What is now limestone, mudstone and sandstone was once soft earth. The tracks are on the bottom of the Paluxy River. River conditions determine what you can see.

Always visible and always fun are fiberglass models of a 70-foot apatosaurus and a 45-foot Tyrannosaurus rex that were commissioned by the Sinclair Oil Co. for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair.

Dinosaur Valley State Park, 1-800-792-1112; www.tpwd.state.tx.us. Tickets: $5 per person, per day, for 13 and older.