Ah! Dinosaurs come to Pitt!

Dinosaurs in Their Time Carnegie Museum of Natural History 412-622-3131 $11 with… Dinosaurs in Their Time Carnegie Museum of Natural History 412-622-3131 $11 with student ID

“Dear Chancellor, buy this for Pittsburgh,” wrote Andrew Carnegie to William J. Holland, the director of his Steel City museum, in 1898.

According to the museum’s history, attached to Carnegie’s note was an article about the “Most Colossal Animal Ever Found,” which he read in New York Journal and Advertiser, and a check for $10,000.

Though the claim was later proven to be a hoax, Holland had already brought a team of fossil hunters to dig up the dinosaur in Wyoming. Undeterred, Hollander moved his team to a different location in the state and in 1899 found what became named Diplodocus carnegii, nicknamed “Dippy.”

At 84 feet of mineralized remains, Dippy became the largest skeletal fossil of the Jurassic period, a size worthy to redeem Hollander’s excavation.

After several more fossil hunts, Dinosaur Hall opened at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1907.

Two years ago, Dinosaur Hall closed and the fossils were shipped to New Jersey to undergo the largest renovation the museum has ever made. Last week the dinosaurs came back to Pittsburgh in a new exhibit, “Dinosaurs in Their Time.”

The remains of these prehistoric creatures no longer stand mounted on marble platforms. Instead, “Dinosaurs in Their Time” places the skeletons in immersive and scientifically accurate environments.

“We’ve learned a lot in the last 100 years,” explained Dr. Matt Lamanna, the lead scientific adviser for the new exhibit. “And there is still a lot more we can learn.”

A walk through the exhibit shows the fossilized dinosaurs among plants, trees and dirt that best represent the Mesozoic environments during which they roamed the earth.

Dr. Lamanna, the museum’s assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology, explained that everything from the correct alignment of the dinosaur bones to the paintings along the wall to the ground on which the dinosaurs walked all painstakingly came together to achieve an accurate rendering of what the world might have been like from 251 to 66 million years ago.

“All you have to do is imagine skin on the fossils and a prehistoric scene is frozen right in front of you,” said Dr. Lamanna.

“Dinosaurs in Their Time” takes the ancient animals off of their platforms and brings them together so viewers can experience a world in which dinosaurs might actually have interacted in.

If anything, the exhibit shows that dinosaurs lived in a highly predatory world. In one scene a Ceratosaurus chases down a plant-eating Dryosaurus. In another, a hungry Allosaurus stalks a baby Apatosaurus whose mother is ready to strike with her tail.

The armored Stegosaurus is able to eat happily and avoid predators with its spiked tail.

If you are looking for the Tyrannosaurus Rex, it’s not there. Not yet.

Though the museum has acquired another T-Rexand plans to display the two beasts fighting each other, there are several skeleton displays from the “Dinosaurs in Their World” exhibit that won’t be open until 2008, when the second phase completes the museum’s latest permanent exhibit.

Not only is “Dinosaurs in Their Time” more engaging for viewers, it’s equally more educational.

While the old Dinosaur Hall cramped together species that lived millions of years apart, “Dinosaurs in Their Time” is a walk through history and evolution.

Each period of time, from the Triassic to the Jurassic to the Cretaceous era, is clearly distinguished by informative and interactive globe stations for each segment of the exhibit – including one for the Cretaceous Seaway portion of the exhibit.

And there’s more than just a plaque to describe these animals; many of the fossils are displayed with touch screens detailing more about how the dinosaurs lived and how their remains have been preserved and displayed.

While one of the biggest changes is increasing the number of standing dinosaur skeletons from 10 in Dinosaur Hall to 19 in “Dinosaurs in Their Time,” it’s obvious a lot more has changed since Carnegie sought out the biggest dinosaur remains money could buy.

For Dr. Lamanna these two seemingly disparate ways of looking at dinosaurs aren’t all that different.

“To me, science and spectacle are fused together,” said Dr. Lamanna.

Having been fascinated with dinosaurs since childhood, Dr. Lamanna explains that there is always an attraction with spectacle or phenomenon that precedes scientific inquiry.

“Certainly [Carnegie’s] main interest was in the enormity of the dinosaurs,” Dr. Lamanna said.

With all its scientifically accurate changes, the best part of “Dinosaurs in Their Time” is that it hasn’t lost that sense of imagination and fascination that still ignites in the minds of both children and adults.