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Dinosaur license plates approved in North Carolina

Fahad Redha

December 22, 2025
2 min read

Dinosaur license plates approved in North Carolina

North Carolina’s Division of Motor Vehicles has approved specialty dinosaur license plates, featuring the skeleton of Acrocanthosaurus. The carnivore is one the signature dinosaur skeletons in the southern US state’s Museum of Natural Sciences, and is known as the “Terror of the South.”

The state’s DMV processed all applications from the initial launch and has put the dinosaur license plates into production, with applications available through its website. From each $30 plate purchase, $20 is donated to the Friends of the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, the non-profit which funds the museum, supporting research, exhibits, educational programmes, and conservational efforts.

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The museum’s specialty dinosaur license plates feature one of the most the most iconic carnivorous dinosaurs, the Terror of the South, Acrocanthosaurus, which roamed the earth 113 to 110 million years ago, and towered at around 11 metres in length, tipping the scales at between 4 and 8 tonnes. Its name, meaning “high-spined lizard,” was coined in 1950 by American palaeontologists J. Willis Stovall and Wann Langston Jr.

North Carolina has long been a hub for dinosaur research, being home to the Black Creek Formation which has been the source for many important finds in the study of prehistoric life.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin

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