CLEVELAND: At the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, children can live the life of a dinosaur.
That’s the idea behind an exhibit called Be The Dinosaur. But don’t worry, children are unlikely to be eaten by carnivorous predators or wiped out by asteroids.
What they will do is to get a sense of what it might have been like to be a Triceratops facing off against a Tyrannosaurus rex. Or what it would be like to find food as a dinosaur, or to lead a dinosaur’s social life.
The exhibit, running through May 4, is designed for children from kindergarten through eighth grade. It combines traditional displays with sophisticated computer simulation to provide a glimpse into the prehistoric past.
Children are invited to explore mysteries of paleontology in a completely interactive way: What did a dinosaur do all day? What was it like to be one? What can fossil evidence tell us about the way extinct animals lived their lives?
As the organizers point out in the exhibit’s literature, these are just the sort of questions that inspire paleontologists to go into the field and discover new evidence.
“This exhibit is designed for families with young children. It offers an introduction to the science of dinosaurs by allowing the visitor to become one,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “They get to be a dinosaur to understand how they lived, ate and died. Kids will love it. What kid doesn’t want to be a dinosaur?”
Ryan said we know so much about dinosaurs that it is surprising to discover just how much we don’t know.
For example, we still don’t know what colors they were, or how they sounded or smelled. Fossils tell us about the size of a dinosaur and provide clues about what they looked like, but they can tell us little about how a dinosaur behaved.
Be the Dinosaur was developed by Eureka Exhibits, using an advisory panel from the paleontology field.
The exhibit combines traditional physical exhibits such as life-sized fossil casts of skulls of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops combined with sophisticated computer simulation. The simulation is based on current data on dinosaur biology, behavior, food sources and ecology.
The virtual ecosystem is based on a specific fossil formation in the badlands of Montana and portions of North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. It is one of the most studied fossil formations in the world.
The dinosaurs have simulated muscles and digestive systems. Virtual winds circulate digital odors. Custom controls maneuver the dinosaur’s limbs, head and neck, jaw, and even nostrils.
“Be the Dinosaur offers visitors the most complex and far-reaching restoration of dinosaurs and their world ever created,” said Glenda Bogar, the museum’s communications director.
Visitors enter the exhibit’s Volcano Gateway to visit an extinct ecosystem that was home to many creatures, including Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
Then they visit the Field Station to understand how we know things about dinosaurs and see life-sized fossil casts.
Finally, they enter the Simulator Pod and learn about life 65 million years ago, through imaging systems and high definition video. Children are invited to use the controls to find out what it was like to be a dinosaur.
For further information visit www.cmnh.org or call 216-231-4600. Museum admission is $12 for adults; $10 for ages 3-18, college students with valid ID and seniors over age 60; free for children 2 and younger.