Given he single-handedly saved Fianna Fáil from political extinction what seems like aeons ago, Taoiseach Michéal Martin was perhaps an apposite choice to open University College Cork’s spectacular new exhibition, Domain of the Dinosaurs at its Glucksman gallery.
So, did the Taoiseach learn anything about what is needed for political survival as he surveyed the skeletal remains of some of the most fearsome creatures to ever walk the Earth?
“This is an absolute showstopper of an exhibition,” he said earnestly. “Great credit goes to UCC professor of palaeontology Maria McNamara for putting it all together with the Glucksman and I thought she put it very well in her speech when she said that it is all about survival.
“Climate really is the issue here. We’ve had mass extinctions before in terms of what happens on planet Earth, but Prof McNamara’s view is that life survives through it all ... There is plenty of food for thought and room for perspective and philosophy and keeping a steady course.”
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And a steady course Mr Martin indeed kept as Prof McNamara, Glucksman director Prof Fiona Kearney and UCC president Prof John O’Halloran steered him around the main sections of the exhibition: Feoil, the carnivore zone, Coillte, the herbivore zone and Farraige, the marine zone.
Chief among the exhibits are skeletal casts of the eight-metre-long Megalosaurus and the five-metre-long Scelidosaurus – the only known dinosaurs from the island of Ireland. Their bones were discovered in the 1980s by a fossil collector, the late Roger Byrne, on a Co Antrim beach.
Prof McNamara said: “These are the only two dinosaurs we know for definite existed in Ireland and they go back exactly 200 million years, right back to first million years of the Jurassic period and they went extinct then later in the Jurassic period.
“We know Scelidosaurus, which weighed five to 10 tonnes, was an armoured plant eater so all those plates that are on the outside are defensive armour because you have predators like Megalosaurus, which weighed 10 to 15 tonnes, walking around in the same ecosystem.”
Sharing top billing in the Coillte herbivore section with Scelidosaurus is its fellow Mesozoic herbivore, the five-metre-long Iguanodon. It could walk on two or four legs and had opposable fifth fingers for grasping leaves which it ate using an efficient chewing mechanism.
Among the other near 300 exhibits are marine reptiles, the three-metre-long Ichthyosaurus, which first appeared in the early Triassic period 250 million years ago, and the similar-sized Plesiosaurus, which first appeared in the late Triassic period some 203 million of years ago.
And people say a week is a long time in politics!
The Domain of the Dinosaurs Exhibition runs at the Glucksman gallery at UCC from Sunday until April 12th 2026.
