A Woolly Mammoth Moves In at the Metro Richmond Zoo

The Metro Richmond Zoo has put a woolly mammoth in the woods behind the lemurs. Ice Age Invasion, a limited-run exhibit of life-size animatronic prehistoric animals, opened August 29 and stays up through October 31, 2026, included with regular zoo admission during normal operating hours.

Ten species are in it. The headliners are the ones a nine-year-old can already name: the woolly mammoth, Smilodon the saber-toothed cat, and Megatherium, the giant ground sloth that stood taller than a person when it reared up. The rest of the roster is where the exhibit gets interesting.

What is actually out there

Alongside the famous three, the zoo lists Andrewsarchus, Doedicurus, Entelodon, Macrauchenia patagonica, Megaloceros giganteus, Mesohippus and Dinornis, the giant moa. That is a deliberately strange guest list. Doedicurus was a heavily armored relative of today’s armadillos, with a spiked club on the end of its tail. Megaloceros giganteus, the giant deer, carried the largest antlers of any deer known. The giant moa is the outlier in the group: a flightless New Zealand bird that survived into human history and was gone within roughly a century of people reaching the islands.

The animatronics move and make sound, and signage along the trail covers the animals and the world they lived in.

Why a zoo builds one of these

A seasonal animatronic exhibit is a straightforward proposition for a zoo. It fills a quiet stretch of the calendar, it gives families a reason to come back before the holidays, and it puts a new attraction inside the gate. The Metro Richmond Zoo has priced this one into general admission rather than charging separately for it, which is the version guests tend to remember kindly.

It also sits in a real tradition. Extinction is the one conservation subject a zoo cannot demonstrate with a living animal, and a mammoth standing among the trees is a legible way to raise it with an audience that came for the giraffes. San Francisco Zoo made the same move this summer with animatronic dinosaurs, and the reasoning on both coasts is the same.

Practical details

Ice Age Invasion is in the forested area at the back of the park, near the lemurs, and runs daily through October 31 within normal zoo hours. The first 2,000 guests to walk it receive an offer from an area restaurant. The zoo has not said whether the exhibit will return.

For the other end of the autumn calendar, Adventure Aquarium is running six weeks of pumpkins, some of them underwater.

Source: Metro Richmond Zoo, “Ice Age Invasion,” August 11, 2026.