00:02 John Daub: Hello everybody and welcome to the Fukui Dinosaur Museum and our first visitor, our first guest of today's show is right in front of me. A Tyrannosaurus Rex in the flesh. Well mostly plastic but yet very scary. Whoa check out those teeth. Look down at me. Your dinner is coming. Little tasty morsels. All you have to do is break the plastic on your feet and go for dinner. Alright that might be a little bit too much. I'm sorry kids I didn't mean to scare you.

01:10 John Daub: Today this museum every third Sunday the Fukui Dinosaur Museum is free. So today is no payment. It's usually $20 or 2,000 yen to enter and it's quite a ways from the city of Fukui. It's an hour train ride plus like a 15-minute bus ride and the trains and buses leave once every 30 minutes. So yeah it takes a long time. It's pretty much a half day or maybe a complete full day.

01:35 John Daub: So our second guest is now standing in front of me. These are definitely carnivores. Look up. Wonderfully preserved. This is a really really good one and his friend right behind him isn't too bad either. Fukui did a really excellent job of setting up this museum. You can see in the center is this massive dome and it just makes the air the sound so much more cooler. It's definitely better than the natural history museum in New York City which has dinosaurs as well but not anything like this. This was built more recently and a lot of these have life-like looking models. So you can see what the dinosaurs look like when they had skin and meat and flesh before the big meteor crash.

03:16 John Daub: There's this raptor and then there he is in skeletal form. So you can see what they look like next to each other and I like that because then it's hard to visualize just a skeleton but when you have the model next to it it's a lot cooler. It's quite a time machine. One thing I always think about is I'd like to go back to the time of dinosaurs and then if you think a little bit longer you realize maybe not. You'd probably be eaten before you could come back. I'm just gonna walk through now this area of the museum.

04:31 John Daub: All the signs are in Japanese and English, so you get to read what they are. This I thought was really cool. You can see a sort of a two-sided video. The dinosaurs walk through you. Whoa, that's a big neck. Down boy. And the dinosaurs will walk through to the other side of the video, which is cool. Uh-oh. Cat fight. It smells something. Whoa. Dude, there's like kids here watching this and they're loving it. You have to do more than that to take down this monster. He's got a big tail. Whoa, this is cooler than I thought it would be. Oh, they got a piece of his gut. All right, so that's the Gigantoraptor [?].

06:56 John Daub: There's a ramp that goes up, so you get to walk spiral around the dome, which is super cool. So let me just give you a very quick walkthrough. I have to keep this short. Whoa, where's the head? Oh, there it is, way up there. Again, this is the Fukui Dinosaur Museum. This is a raptor. And this is your next meal. Hi! The red lights make it really cool-looking.

08:14 John Daub: Okay, and they've done a really excellent job, Fukui has at this museum mainly because it's brand-new and they have these new LED lights that add amazing shadows and give the bones a lot of contrast. You can see the signs are bilingual. Fukui is considered Japan's dinosaur kingdom because in 1982 they discovered dinosaur bones and started excavating them and found that they had a lot of dinosaur bones in Fukui. Fukui surprisingly has a lot of mountains as well. From the museum, looking all around the outside, loads of mountains with snow still on them. So it's a very stunning place this area of Fukui. It's sort of in the center of the prefecture. Oh there's a triceratops.

09:47 John Daub: Again they give these real-life looking models which help you imagine what they look like in real life. I like the way they did that. Little baby dinosaurs. Wow with that purple background. How cool is that? They put a pterodactyl on the roof there. Whoa that was close. Get behind the glass.

10:35 John Daub: Alright. So I was saying Fukui Prefecture is on the Sea of Japan. It's not far from Kanazawa which is on the Shinkansen line. So if you come to Kanazawa by Shinkansen you can take a local train or an express train to Fukui. It's one of the more inconvenient places because there's no Shinkansen line coming to Fukui which means it doesn't get as many tourists which is a shame. Flights are also infrequent and a little bit more expensive so getting to Fukui, maybe bus is best. Yeah. Cool. There's another dino behind me. They've put in here lots of interactive stuff.

11:39 John Daub: This is my second walkthrough. It's like a DJ record wheel of rocks. I found a way to make rocks cool. And the maps. The maps are all in Japanese but there's English explanations for everything. South America, North America, and then again everything's in English. Why do earthquakes occur? The epicenters of earthquakes in the world are distributed along plate boundaries where plates collide. The plate boundaries include three types. Cool huh? Oh, volcanoes. Oh, colored rocks.

13:04 John Daub: So this is the kind of stuff that you see here at the Fukui. Colored rocks. Wow. I asked if these are from space. These aren't from space. This one looks like it's from space. Uchuu (outer space) means outer space in Japanese. That's an uchuu-kara (from space). That'd be cool if he said yes. That's what I would do. If someone asked me something ridiculous, I'd totally lie and say yes from space, man.

14:03 John Daub: And I'm back where I started. It's really awesome, isn't it? This museum. Akachan desu ka? (Is it a baby?) Akachan! (Baby!) Kawaii, ne? (Cute, right?) So you can see again the red and the blue. They're real life models in the same poses. It really puts them in place. Dinosaurs.

15:12 John Daub: Alright, and back here where we started. Here's the entrance. You know when I first came here, kids would walk in here. They'd be two or three years old. Run up to the dinosaur, then they'd freeze. Five seconds later, they'd start crying. And they'd be crying for 20 minutes. Because that dinosaur is creepily real to kids that are two or three years old. They've seen it on TV. They've seen them in little action figures. They've never seen anything like this. This is just like life-size. Why would you bring a three-year-old here and scare the crap out of them? Unless you're a father that would just crack up because you're scaring the crap out of your kid. And then in that sense, yeah, I'd bring all my kids here. Like, every day. But nobody likes a crying baby.

16:19 John Daub: There's one right there. You see behind me? He got scared from the dinosaur. He's crying to dad. Dad said, it was pretty scary, wasn't it? And he's going, mm, mm. Yeah. I'm telling you, to us, that's cool. But to a kid, that's freakishly scary to see a life-size dinosaur.

16:47 John Daub: I'm going to walk up the ramp now to go to the second floor and then leave. I'm going to see if I can try a drone shot. Wow, look at those teeth. Of the dinosaur museum and I took some high-res images if you want to see it, it's on the it'll be on the DVD for the Kickstarter project that I'm doing to help fund this trip. Every crying kid is because of the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the beginning too cool.

17:52 John Daub: He was crying because it was scary you know why did it have to be so scary he said it is really cool and this ramp that walks up to the second floor it takes you round around the dome they've done such an awesome job with this museum haven't they Godzilla he lives in Fukui probably came from Fukui for all we know they have awesome food here I could see why dinosaurs would want to live here that lady doesn't know there's a dinosaur lurking behind her I'd totally go for the bag and rip it off and freak her out right now looks like Jurassic Park anyway does it.

19:07 John Daub: Is that a nut shot I don't know I'm just gonna do it. If not, sorry for the Jurassic Park song.

19:41 John Daub: I'm spiraling up to the second floor now. Which would conclude our tour. Thank you for joining us for the Fukui Dinosaur Museum Tour. I've been your guide. True story. I think it was the DJI Osmo doing most of the work. This museum is gorgeous. You can see it's just a dome. A really big dome. Every time a kid cries, it echoes. That much more annoying. They have these routes you're supposed to follow. I just cut right through them.

21:11 John Daub: And then one more shot from the front. This is your bye-bye shot, everybody. I want to thank everybody who's been supporting on Patreon and Kickstarter. People have been saying I should promote that a little bit more. So I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to go and try to fly the drone and get back onto the interchange where the guy yesterday let me off. Mr. Shimizu, I think was his name. Really nice guy. I want to wish him good luck. The guy who picked me up is running in a marathon today. I want to wish him some luck. He's in Ishikawa up north. Just not far from here. Running right now, I think. Hope he gets a personal best. We have almost the same time running a marathon. Which I thought was cool. I like to make that connection. We talked about running the whole time. That's the guy who picked me up in the live feed that you saw yesterday.

22:09 John Daub: Thanks everybody for supporting on Patreon and on the Kickstarter. The DVD. I'm actually really, really thankful for everybody ordering the DVD because I have to order that in bulk. And if nobody buys it, then I'll be stuck with like 500 DVDs. So thanks for supporting the trip through that. I'm going to turn the camera around. One last shot of Tyrannosaurus Rex for the next 20 seconds as I say goodbye. See you on the road. Bye bye from Fukui Dinosaur Museum. See if you can spot any little kids getting freaked out and crying by the way. Come on. Eat them. Eat them. Ah.