This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.

If you’ve ever wanted to see, touch or even smell what life was like when the dinosaurs walked the earth, this is the place.

This month, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is opening an exhibit that will use scents and sounds mimicking an ancient forest to recreate a primeval paradise. The museum in downtown Raleigh will also display prehistoric murals and a trove of fossils meant to transport visitors “back to the Cretaceous,” as Javan Sutton put it.