Luxury Custom Homes in Mount Pleasant, SC

Dinosaurs and the month of November, yes, it's Dinovember and it's a real thing! Here at the Wando Mount Pleasant Library, the staff celebrates Dinovember every year with fun displays and activities for anyone to drop in and experience all month long.

This year's Dinovember activities will include two scavenger hunts, a dino quiz (all answers can be found in our displays), voting for Who Would Win (dinos versus book characters), dino magnetic poetry, dino tangrams, bookmarks and coloring sheets. There will be life-sized displays of T-Rex, Stegosaurus, Alamosaurus, Mosasaurus, Archelon and Pterosaurs.

Every year we feature a new life-sized dinosaur display in the children's room Oculus (a beautiful circular room almost completely made of windows), and this year we will feature Bruce, the 40-foot Mosasaur. This was inspired by the new Jurassic Seas exhibit at the SC Aquarium which features life-sized Mosasaur skeletons and is worth a visit. Mosasaurs were a group of large aquatic marine reptiles that lived during the late Cretaceous period. They were some of the fiercest ocean predators while Tyrannosaurs such as T-Rex were terrors on land.

One of the many fun things to discover through the Wando Dinovember displays is that some of the animals that we think of as dinosaurs, such as the flying Pterosaurs and the large aquatic reptiles Plesiosaurus and Mosasaurus, aren't dinosaurs at all. They are all reptiles that lived during the age of the dinosaurs, but true dinosaurs (members of the Dinosauria) are a very specialized group of reptiles that had certain similar traits such as a pelvis with a hole in the hip socket that allowed them to have a more upright stance (think of legs underneath the body like a T-Rex, as opposed to a crocodile which has legs that sprawl out to the side).

Another fun fact to discover through our displays and a scavenger hunt is that Dinosaurs are still alive and can be found in your backyard. Scientists now generally agree that birds are dinosaurs, and many adult and children's books have been devoted to this tantalizing topic. "Tiny Dino" by Deborah Freedman is a wonderful children's picture book, and "The Story of Birds" by Steve Brusatte is a wonderful new book for adults, both of which can be checked out at the Charleston Public Library.

16 µg/m³

Hourly forecast

Mount Pleasant air quality index (AQI⁺) forecast

Daily forecast

Mount Pleasant air quality index (AQI⁺) forecast

Air pollutants

What is the current air quality in Mount Pleasant?

PM2.5 concentration is currently 3.2 times the World Health Organization annual PM2.5 guideline value.

Health recommendations

The operator behind Husk and Marbled & Fin on the Charleston peninsula is cooking up a concept for the East Cooper market.

Neighborhood Dining Group said it will manage a new restaurant that will make its debut next year at 1434 Ira Road in Mount Pleasant, just north of Highway 17 and the Interstate 526 overpass.

David Howard, the company’s founder and CEO, said in a written statement that he couldn’t provide “any additional details about our plans other that the timeline goal of opening being summer 2027.”

He added that his company is focusing for now on the launch of Cheeky, its new seafood venture near the Gibbes Museum on Meeting Street. Neighborhood Dining Group also operates Delaney Oyster House downtown, Minero in Atlanta and Johns Island, and The James on James Island.

The backers of the future Mount Pleasant restaurant include Blackbaud Inc. founder, former Charleston Battery owner and real estate investor Tony Bakker. He leads a company that recently paid $5 million for a newly built 4,600-square foot structure that was to be the home of Frank & Jack’s.

Bakker isn’t a newcomer to either the food-and-beverage business or Neighborhood Dining Group. They previously worked together when he owned Queen Anne’s Revenge on Daniel Island and The Buccaneer near the City Market. He was also an early investor in Husk and the now-closed McCrady's on East Bay Street.

Frank & Jack’s was developed by Damon Navarro's High Tide Provisions LLC, which announced last year that the restaurant would serve "reimagined nostalgic dishes with a modern twist" with lunch, dinner and weekend brunch menus starting in late summer 2025, but it never opened.

Navarro said in a written statement this week that a "family emergency ... caused a change of plans for the management group. They decided that the timing would not work for them and that they would have to pass on the opportunity."

The building is across Highway 17 from the Walmart-anchored Wando Crossing shopping center. It was developed by Navarro's 1434 Ira Rd LLC.

The never-used metal-clad dining venue was listed earlier this year for $6.95 million, according to online marketing brochures. The sale started coming together in mid-June, when an architect representing 1434 Ira Rd asked to postpone the review of some final design plans at a town meeting, citing “an immediate and major change in the project's ownership structure.”

“This pending transition introduces new exterior design concepts from the incoming owners,” according to the written request. “Consequently, the documents currently submitted no longer accurately reflect the project's intent.”

The sale closed Sept. 8, according to Charleston County real estate records.