Walking among dinosaurs in Charlotte

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on July 13, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

I played with plastic dinosaurs as a boy, making my Triceratops improbably dominate my Tyrannosaurus, and I drove 40 miles out of my way into the Navajo Nation to see a 200-million-year-old footprint from a therapod in the hard Arizona clay. So when I heard about Blume Studios’ “Life Chronicles,” I was excited. I’d always figured the only way I could walk among dinosaurs was to visit the N.C. General Assembly.

Yet there they were, almost life-size — you could not have brought a 100-foot Diplodocus up close in a virtual reality show — and awe-inspiring. They arrived roughly in the middle of the 45-minute experience, which begins with the creation of the universe and ends 200 years in the future. I enjoyed everything about it except the people.

Not the ones from 60,000 years ago, short and stockily muscular and peacefully inclined toward us time-travelers as they sat around their fire. No, the ones who were taking a different kind of voyage in the adjacent, Egyptian-themed “Horizon of Khufu.”

Both events take place in the same vast room, with pathways on the floor visible once you put on your VR headset. Blume Studios staff are in there, too, ready to assist in case of mechanical failures, queasiness or other impediments to finishing the journey.

Two months ago, staffers who adjusted your headsets asked every patron to keep silent and follow carefully delineated paths on the floor. They don’t always do that now, and the Khufu quartet who preceded us on a humid Sunday giggled, conversed in normal voices, stumbled into the Jurassic period of my journey — they show up as lighted avatars, so you won’t bump into them — and generally treated Blume Stage 1 as their living room.

But if you go at a time when visitors understand and follow the rules, you really can escape reality. “Life Chronicles” especially has an “Alice in Wonderland” quality: We breathe underwater next to bacteria that look like balloons in a Thanksgiving Day parade, then later ride on the back of a trilobite 50 times larger than the one sitting in my desk drawer.

The designers at Paris-based Excurio don’t stint on dinos. We get a face-off between Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus that ends in a stand-down, which made me grateful I’d been spared a grisly battle. We see velociraptors guarding their eggs and shaking colorful feathers — you knew dinosaurs evolved into today’s birds, right? — and even an unidentified ankylosaurus ambling by with his clubbed tail.

Surprisingly, though, all the other creatures hold your interest almost as much. In a period when insects flew at the top of the food chain, a carnivorous dragonfly buzzes by us ferociously. Tiny mammals scuttle among the liana vines of a later time, and a kind of proto-monkey scampers through the trees and bombards us with fruit. (I hope it was fruit.) The designers have been detailed enough to populate a forest canopy not only with multi-hued parrots who seize the eye but an iridescent tree snail you could easily miss.

The plot, if you want to call it that, sends the human avatar Charlie and a drone named Darwin (get it?) back to the Big Bang to study the start of life. Darwin malfunctions, and he can get us back to the future only by stopping in eras when other drones have been planted (I think) as supplemental energy sources for returning travelers. Along the way, Darwin identifies species and tells us where we’d be in the world we now know: China, France, Germany, even Hell Gate, Mont., a great place to find T. rex 70 million years ago.

We ultimately shoot forward to 2223, to a city where ichthyosaur-shaped vessels sail the skies. Along the way, we stop in 2023 in a wild animal park in Tanzania, where Charlie and Darwin discuss the precipitous drop in the numbers of elephants and other species. Can these trends be reversed, she wonders? Yes, he says, if humans take more interest in the planet’s health than they have in recent decades. The sermon is brief and to the point, although … if these two come from 2223, wouldn’t they know which species had gone extinct by then?

Like “Khufu” and the third VR experience at Blume, “Space Explorers” (about the International Space Station), you could see “Life Chronicles” multiple times and keep learning or finding another eye-opening vista. I’ll try to do it again on a weekday next month. Because even 3.5 billion years ago, two was company, four a crowd.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.