Here's another: Many people assume all dinosaurs lived at the same time and plodded the planet together. It isn't unusual, in a movie or storybook, to come across a fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex snapping at a giant Diplodocus. Yet that pair had no more chance of meeting each other than of running into Fred Flintstone. Long before Tyrannosaurus was even an endangered species, the Diplodocus had become extinct.
Such lore - and much more about the 160 million years in which giant reptiles dominated the earth - has been gathered by Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences for its blockbuster exhibit "Discovering Dinosaurs," which officially opens tomorrow, the 174th anniversary of the academy's founding.
The new exhibit took four years and $2.5 million to complete. It features dinosaur skeletons, of course (some real, some reproductions; some small, some HUGE). It includes a realistic-looking dinosaur robot that moves its neck and fixes beady eyes on awed visitors. It incorporates a computer data base ("Dino Data") that visitors can play with.
It provides information on ancient reptiles other than dinosaurs (if it flew or swam, it wasn't a dinosaur). It provides a place to learn how to dig for fossils (with souvenir fossils that can be carted away). It offers a walk through a room that has been transformed into the kind of landscape - complete with creatures, trees, stream and fish - that existed 65 million years ago. It offers film clips from Hollywood's best-known dinosaur fantasies. (See Raquel Welch carried off by a giant reptile!)
"Discovering Dinosaurs" presents the most recent findings and theories science has to offer on the subject of dinosaurs, which is why so many of its exhibits challenge long-held beliefs. One of the most obvious changes: the tilt of the dinosaur's tail.
