Give a glorified playground some educational value.

A mini dinosaur park has appeared on Roxas Boulevard in Manila, but the resin-made figures are anything but mini. The prehistoric animals are built to scale and realistic enough to delight the kid in all of us. A city hall brainchild, the permanent exhibit adds yet another attraction to the growing congestion of Baywalk, the seaside promenade and crowning jewel of Manila's impresario mayor Lito Atienza.

The dinosaurs were manufactured by Yab Design, an Angono-based local company that exports large, synthetic figures to Europe, but usually representing more mundane objects like giant bottles.

I've been comparing the boulevard dinosaurs with those in an educational web site, and the displayed do resemble the originals. Now all that's needed are labels on those things, to give what is really a glorified playground some educational value. There is no information anywhere near it. Children -- or most adults for that matter -- have no way there of knowing that the long-necked dinosaur above, for example, is an Apatosaurus, formerly known as the Brontosaurus, one of the largest land animals ever to exist. The real thing was about 15 feet tall at the hips. These plant eaters had nostrils on top of their heads; paleontologists, or fossil scientists, haven't figured out the use of this unique anatomical feature. The Apatosaurus lived during the late Jurassic Period, about 157-146 million years ago.

The other species in the photo above is the rhinoceros-like Triceratops. Though dwarfed by the Apatosaurus, the carnivorous Triceratops seems capable of devouring both the curious four year old and the dedma Christmas shopper at the same time.