SIR David Attenborough has teed up a booming Easter for York by opening a ‘thrilling’ new dinosaur exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum.

The 91-year-old naturalist and television presenter took a guided tour of Yorkshire’s Jurassic World today before meeting local schoolchildren, and spoke enthusiastically about the new technology which is giving visitors an immersive experience.

The exhibition has opened just in time for the hordes of tourists expected to descend on the city for the Easter holidays - one of York’s busiest times for tourists.

Excited pupils from Westfield Primary School used a virtual reality device to 'feed' branches to a sauropod at the Jurassic World exhibition, while an augmented reality ipad showed them how huge fossilised sea dragons, found on the Yorkshire Coast in the 19th century, would have looked when swimming around in their day.

Sir David, who presented the most watched programme of last year, Blue Planet 2, said he had been interested in palaeontology and the world of dinosaurs and sea monsters since he was a child, and was still fascinated by them to this day.

He said: “It’s an excellent museum with a splendid display, marvellous objects and some very surprising ones. The huge sea reptiles are as impressive as any I have seen anywhere, and you’ve got five of them, which seems a bit greedy!

“And like all good regional museums, it illuminates the area in which the citizens of this great city live. It should be one of the great treasures of their municipal life.”

The exhibition, taking visitors on an epic journey back through 150 million years of Yorkshire to discover lost giants and the changing worlds they inhabited, opens to the general public tomorrow.