RED BANK & MIDDLETOWN: T-REX RETURNS

A 15-foot-long T-Rex puppet from Field Station: Dinosaurs, seen here in 2012, returns to the Red Bank Public Library Tuesday. (Photo by Stacie Fanelli. Click to enlarge.)

He’s scaly, maybe a bit scary, some 15 feet long, and usually spotted in the company of a singing paleontologist known as the Dinosaur Troubador. He’s the traveling T-Rex from Bergen County attraction Field Station: Dinosaurs, and he’s returning to libraries in Red Bank and Middletown this week.

It’s a Jurassic jaunt that begins Tuesday on the grounds of Red Bank Public Library, when the “Tyrannosaurus Rep” from the Field Station joins the Troubador for an 11:30 a.m. meet-and-greet, during an event that begins with a singalong session inside the library’s Avice Noblett Children’s Room.

Following the approximately 30-minute music and storytelling program, young explorers are invited to take it outside for a close-up encounter with the puppet-powered Rex, who at 15 feet in length is, as redbankgreen reported previously, “a pipsqueak compared to the 42-foot beasts that roamed the Earth 65 million years ago.”

Visit the library online or in person to register for Tuesday’s dino-meet — or drop in at Middletown Library on Thursday for a program that begins at 2:30 p.m. with a Troubador performance in the Community Room, then takes it out to the library’s garden area for an informative meet-up with the lifelike, roaring, breathing T-Rex. There’s no registration necessary for the approximately hour-long event.

Founded by former Two River Theater general manager Guy Gsell — and recently relocated to temporary quarters at Leonia’s Overpeck County Park, from its original site in Secaucus — Field Station: Dinosaurs offers the public a look at its awesome menagerie of animatronic dinos on weekends through June 25, and then Tuesdays through Sundays from June 27 to September 3 (plus Labor Day Monday, September 4). Take it here for hours of operation, directions and admission info.