‘Elastic Park’: Artists create 20-foot balloon dinosaur

Move over, Jurassic Park. We're now obsessed with a family-friendly alternative: Elastic Park.

Led by the innovative Larry Moss, the balloon artist collective Airigami recently created a 20-foot balloon dinosaur at the Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH).

Check out the making of the best balloon animal ever:

"We’ve built dinosaurs before, but this is the first time we were able to build alongside a cast of an actual dinosaur skeleton. Having a life-size model next to us sure made the construction a lot easier. Our design, based on images we found online, was pretty accurate, but it was nice to be able to look up and take measurements off of the real thing," Moss wrote on Airigami's blog.

Volunteers and visiting schoolchildren gave the team a hand:

"Several classes of kindergarten and first grade students learned to twist balloons and helped make some of the ground cover in the display."

The huge acrocanthosaurus, a dinosaur from the early cretaceous period, will be on display until it begins to deflate.

"The balloons have a very short life span. Most of our installations are only kept up for a week," Moss explained. "Some may last longer, if conditions are just right — climate control, no direct sunlight, but we never count on more than a week in an open, public place. The museum this was in was planning on keeping it up for the week, but said they'd keep it up as long as they could."

"We encourage everyone that can make it to the museum in the next week to make sure you don’t miss this unique opportunity to view 'Elastic Park,'" said Ryan Barber, deputy director of VMNH. "Words don't do this creation justice, as it really is something that will amaze you when you see it in person."