Field Station: Dinosaurs, the animatronic Jurassic playground that has drawn visitors to Overpeck County Park in Leonia for more than a decade, will close after this weekend.
But the roaring, life-sized dinosaurs aren’t done with New Jersey just yet.
The herd is migrating down the Parkway to a new home along the Atlantic City Boardwalk.
Showboat Atlantic City has purchased all 31 life-sized dinosaurs currently on display and plans to build a dino-themed attraction next to the resort, slated to open in spring 2026.
The move keeps the creatures together and keeps them in the state, something the park's founder and executive producer, Guy Gsell, said was important to him.
“We’re like the family who moves from a house to an apartment and has to give away their pets," he said. “We wanted to make sure that the pets had a nice place to go and that they stayed together.”
About a month ago, the park listed its dinosaurs on Facebook Marketplace. A feathered velociraptor was listed for $700, while a bucking green-and-orange hadrosaurus (the species first discovered in Haddonfield, New Jersey) was going for $2,450. The long-necked apatosaurus was the priciest (not counting a pair of hatching eggs) at $2,860.
Inquiries rolled in from as far away as Europe and South America, including zoos and “wealthy people who thought it would be nice to have a dinosaur next to their pool,” Gsell said.
He joked that the dinosaurs are simply following a familiar trajectory: “It’s like a really common progression in New Jersey to move from Hudson County to Bergen County to the beach.”
Two T. rex specimens, which are no longer on display, will stick around northern New Jersey, one donated to The Borough of Leonia, and the other to Bergen County.
This weekend will mark the end of Field Station's 14th season. The park opened in 2012 as a simple outdoor dinosaur exhibit. Over time, it morphed into a hybrid of science display, live theater, music and educational programming.
Field Station worked with an actual paleontologist to help make sure the animatronic animals were as accurate as possible. A Chinese company called Jade Bamboo crafted each of them.
The herd has grown over the years as children’s tastes have changed – and the “Jurassic Park” film series introduced them to new species.
One of the most recent additions was the sail-backed Spinosaurus, Gsell said.
“That has happened over and over again that different dinosaurs become more popular and we have to add them to the collection,” he said.
In the park’s final days, many of the visitors are adults who first visited as children. Gsell recalled greeting a young woman at the front gate recently.
“She took out her phone and showed me a picture of me with a little kid,” he said. It turns out the little kid was her.
Those sorts of moments remind Gsell of why he created the park in the first place — and of his first memory of going to see life-size dinosaurs at the New York World’s Fair.
“ To think that I gave that to basically a whole other generation of kids makes it very gratifying for me,” he said.
Naturally, Gsell has thought a lot about why kids latch onto dinosaurs. As they get older, he said, amazing things get taken away from them — Santa, dragons, the Easter Bunny — but “dinosaurs are never taken away because they were real.”
There’s also something about how time works for children; 65 million years doesn’t really mean much to them, he said. “So being told dinosaurs once lived right where they’re standing makes the creatures feel startlingly present.”
For its final weekend, Field Station is planning a lineup of past favorites. There will be a Dinosaur Dance Party, a show about scientific discoveries (and dinosaur feathers) and something called Dinosaur Feeding Frenzy (the lead puppeteer will be performing inside the T. rex.).
While the park is closing, Gsell and the Field Station team aren’t entirely done. They’ll be leaning more into programming, staging traveling shows and producing library programming.
Showboat Atlantic City could not be reached for comment.
