Manchester Museum is giving one family the magical opportunity to spend the night in its Fossils and Dinosaurs gallery...
Manchester Museum is offering one family the chance to sleep alongside its resident Tyrannosaurus rex, Stan, in what will be the first overnight stay of its kind in the museum’s history.
The experience is being offered through a prize draw, with the winning family getting the Fossils and Dinosaurs gallery to themselves after the museum closes.
As well as bedding down alongside Stan, they’ll be taken on a guided torchlight tour of the museum’s galleries, before taking part in an activity and settling in for a film screening.
Entry to the draw costs £5, with tickets available from the Manchester Museum Shop. Each ticket counts as one entry, with the winner selected at random.
The prize can be claimed by a family of up to two adults and four children.
“We can’t be completely sure what happens when the sun goes down in our Fossils and Dinosaurs gallery because nobody has ever spent the night in there before but we can only imagine the kind of fun that can be had with Stan the T. rex and his friends,” said Dean Whiteside, Head of Commercial and Operations at Manchester Museum.
“This is a chance to be a part of museum history and enjoy the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience you can’t usually buy. At the same time, Manchester Museum is a charity so, by getting behind this initiative, you’ll be helping to support vital work that impacts the lives of people across Greater Manchester and beyond.”
Stan has been one of the museum’s best-known residents since arriving in 2004. The skeleton is a cast of one of the most complete T. rex specimens ever discovered, with evidence of injuries including a cavity in its skull thought to have been caused by another T. rex tooth.
Elsewhere in the gallery is Percy the Plesiosaur, a 180-million-year-old marine reptile fossil discovered by University of Manchester students and their lecturer in 1960, and April the Tenontosaurus, one of the most complete specimens of the Cretaceous herbivore.
The prize draw opened on Wednesday 2 September and closes on Monday 28 September 2026.
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