brown tones. “If you had told me fi ve years ago that we would actually know the color of a dino- saur,” Irmis says, “I would have said ‘No way.’ ” Many new displays bring the creatures to life,
but he also has a flair for drama. He takes par- ticular pride in a skeletal pack of carnivorous allosaurs preparing to finish off a skeletal sau- ropod, its long neck twisted in panic. A winding walkway takes visitors past a 33-foot-long, 90 per- cent intact skeleton of a duck-billed Gryposaurus; a 35-foot-long cast of a croc-like Deinosuchus, a reminder that dinos weren’t the only ones at the top of Utah’s Cretaceous food chain; and a display of 12 replica skulls from the ceratopsian family tree, including the recently found Utah resident Kosmoceratops, a show-off that was blessed with 15 horns and, one suspects, a self-confi dent stride. The entire collection rewards close
attention. A cast of a tiny Archaeopteryx— an early bird that had dino-like claws and teeth—dangles from a wire near the sauro- pod. A scent station offers a hint of rotting dinosaur fl esh at the push of a button. The scene includes a troodon, a sleek predator with sickle-shaped claws and long, gray feathers that shine with orange highlights. Those feathers aren’t a fl ight of a pale-
ontologist’s imagination; they’re based on fossilized imprints of related species found in China. The shade isn’t a wild guess, either. The feathers in one Chinese fos- sil showed microscopic hints of what the scientists described as chestnut to reddish-
34 MAY+JUNE 2012 I
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none more so than the reenvisioned Dinosaur Hall at the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY (
nhm.org). In a piece of performance art worthy of Hollywood, actors in uncannily realistic costumes portray a life-size juvenile T. rex and a Triceratops multiple times a week. In the new hall—twice the size of the old one—even the skeletons are in action mode. One display shows a stegosaur flailing at an allosaur with the business end of its spiked tail. This isn’t a Hollywood story. Some allosaur bones actually carry spike wounds from battles long ago. The exhibit also includes a trio of T. rex skeletons: a 2-year-old baby, a 13-year-old juve- nile, and a massive adult—a grouping that makes these animals seem all the more vivid. They were breathing, bleeding, fl esh-and-bone animals that somehow carried their stories to the modern world. You just have to know where to look. ●
chris woolston also writes for the Los Angeles Times, Reader’s Digest, and Afar magazine.
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LEFT, hikers in Dinosaur National Monument hit the Green River trail. RIGHT, an allosaur bares its teeth in Utah’s new natural history museum.
TO FIND NINE MORE DINOSAUR DISPLAYS IN THE WEST, SEARCH FOR “DINO SITES” AT
AAA.COM/VIA.
LEFT: JOHN & LISA MERRILL/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: STUART RUCKMAN
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