For my son's 5th birthday, he decided he wanted a "Land Before Time" Dinosaur party.  I found most party supplies (i.e. invitations, cups, plates, streamers, balloons, prize packs etc.) from birthdaypartyexpress.com (BPE). The invitations were sent to each childs name with a dinosaur name attatched, (i.e. Austinasauras) which read, "Journey through the mist, to the Great Valley" with our address. We read through quite a few dinosaur party ideas on this site, and we decided we were going to make a volcano. I would definately recommend starting this at least a week in advance, as the plaster takes a long time to dry.  My husband took two tomato baskets, and a cylinder tupperware bottle, wired them together, fastened it to a wood board as a base, foiled it, and put the strips of newspaper dipped in plaster of paris.  When it dried, he made a thicker batch of plaster and just put it on with his hands to shape it.  When it dried, he painted it a few different shades of black, brown, reddish-orange around the top, and green at the bottom. He put some fake plants, and lava rocks all around the base, it looked awesome. We decorated with foam dino foot prints all over the front door, and put some balloons with dino faces out front. We set up the party in the backyard. We had his party from 1-3pm, and when guests first arrived, I had a mini dino at each place setting, and a small container of playdoh.  I asked them to make the dinosaur from putty just like the one at their place, or build and egg around it. That kept them occupied until all of the guests got there and we could serve lunch.  We served dino nuggets and dino eggs (tator tots) with lava sauce (ketchup), and jurassic juice (hawaiin punch) in the cutest egg hatchling cups from BPE (which they got to keep).  After lunch, we started the party by preparing the guests to blend into their environment by making their best TRex sounds.  After that, we had the dino walk. We made 4 dinosaur feet out of cereal boxes and fun foam cut into dino feet shapes, and the kids wore the feet, and put on their dinosaur noses (BPE) and had to walk across the backyard carrying an egg on a spoon and returning the egg to the dino nest (a small inflatable pool filled with sand) before the dinos found them missing. We did two at a time, they loved this.  After they returned the eggs, I snapped a photo of them giving their best dino pose to send with the thank-yous.  After this we did musical dino walk.  We printed off dino pictures off the internet, laminated them and made a circle on the patio, and played dinosaur music while they walked in a circle. When the music stopped, we pulled a matching picture out of the hat, and whoever was on the picture was out.  After this, we did the pin the tail on the triceratops. When that was finished, we played the "cera-chase".  We had one child be Cera's head, and one person be her tail (we tied a tie around their waist) and all the other kids were Cera's body. They all had to hold on the person in front of them, and it was the job of the head to grab the tie off of the tail, and the tail tried not to be caught. They loved this, and all took turns being the head and tail.  The next thing was the dinosaur hatch.  We blew up opaque balloons, and put dinosaur stickers in them, the kids each raced to see who could "hatch" theirs first.  After that, we had the kids put on their pith helmets and binoculars for the dinosaur dig.  We got the bitty buckets (BPE) and each bucket came with 12 small dinosaurs, which we emptied into our big turtle sandbox.  We had the little paleantologists dig to find the extinct dinos, and they were able to fill their buckets.  When they all had a full bucket, we errupted the volcano. The kids and adults all thought that was cool. We played with many variations of the baking soda, water, dish soap, red food coloring, and vinegar to come up with what worked the best for our volcano. We were able to errupt 4 or 5 times. Then it was time for cake. We had gotten a TRex shaped cake pan, and made our own.  It looked really great.  I also got little waffle cone bowls, and put the cake and ice cream in them with whipped cream on top to make little volcano desserts. When everyone was through, we opened presents. I had never done a theme party before, and had no idea how long anything would take, or what things would be a success, but the timing was perfect.  The parents started picking up 5 minutes after the last present was opened.  The kids got prizes (BPE prize boxes) for every game they played, plus they kept their dino cups, helmets, binoculars, dino noses, and lava rocks.  They ended up taking home a ton of stuff. The party was a huge success, the parents and kids all thought it was so fun.  Thanks for all those who write to give these great suggestions. This was a fun party to do.