2005年NPR美国国家公共电台五月-New Exhibit Updates Story of Dinosaur Era

 Tomorrow New York's American Museum of Natural History opens an exhibit designed to provide insight into dinosaur 1 lifestyles. The exhibit showcases new discoveries , many of them from China. They include feathered dinosaurs 2 and an ancestor of T-rex. Npr's Christopher Joyce visited the museum as exhibiters scrambled 3 to put on the finishing touches.

At the heart of the new exhibit is a big open diorama shaped like a horseshoe. It's a platform covered in plants and small trees. The sounds of insects and the rumble 4 of a distant volcano help set the scene. Workers on ladders are hanging reptilian-looking birds so they will soar through the scene.

Try that one first, and make a hook,and see if it'll come down from the truss, maybe if it came down from the truss, it was like halfway 5 ...

The scene is meant to transport people to Northern China 130 million years ago. It looks like a state park in New Jersey 6, but that's OK. It's supposed to. Artists made a painting of a New Jersey forest for the diorama's backdrop. It had the right kind of conifers. They even brought back real leaf litter. The animals re-created in the diorama, however, are not New Jerseyan, but cretaceous.

In the very center, we have a ,we have Dilong paradoxus, which is an early Tyrannosaur, which was actually discovered and described while we're working on this project.

Allen Walker is the project production manager, “Over here then, we have Caudipteryx, which are a lot like a ,kind of a bizarre turkey-like animal. And then, to the right of that we have Beipiaosaurus. It has huge front claws.The hands are bigger than the feet, and this is like one of the crazier cretaceous.

These terrestrial dinosaurs look bird-like , then they are the real birds, though some have extra claws and teeth. Walker is concerned about the way they're hanging over the diorama.

Right now these are all, kind of in a collision course. And when we put the things up, and we look at them for a while, it's like "This doesn't quite work." So part of our punch list is to Move Day, which is Sinornithomimus, that one, because there was a rhythm where they all look like they're facing the same way and they're same distance apart.

Most of these specimens 8 came from Liaoning in China, many are being shown for the first time. They include the earliest known feathered dinosaur. These animals couldn't fly. Scientists are trying to figure out what the feathers were for and how they were related to the first fliers. On video screens sprinkled throughout the hall, scientists provide commentary on the fossils and where they came from.

Fantastic fossil animals at Liaoning beg another question, what did the place look like 130 millions years ago? It's only three main lines that's ever used to answer that sort of question.

My name is Steve Quinn, I'm senior project manager in the department of Exhibition and Graphics 9. The site dates back to 130 millions years ago .Volcanic 10 activity covered the site with very fine dust, and preserved everything from plants, insects, reptiles 11, amphibians 12 as well as the big mega form of the larger dinosaurs and birds, which enable the artists to bring prehistoric 13 world back to life.

I'm Lauri Halderman. I'm the director of Exhibition Interpretation 14. We've got lots of new information about dinosaurs, lots of new stories to tell you about how they moved, how they behaved, even how they died. But we've also got this thread going through, that says, we don't just want you to know what we know, but we want you to know how we know it.

To that end, the exhibit offers something unique: a life-sized Apatosaurus, the sixty-foot-long, plant-eating dinosaur with the long neck. It has ribs 15 and vertebra and a skull 16 like regular museum dinosaurs, but these are not bone-like bones-- they are cast in bright silvery metal.

I took a small group of people through here the other day, and a woman came around the corner and saw this, and said to me, "What is it?" and, that's exactly what we want you to ask. If you ask what is it, we've got you. Now, we can tell you.

"What it is" is a life-size model of a dinosaur that was first created on a computer. Scientists use digital models of dinosaurs to study how they would have moved. They can't push around giant skeletons with 200-pound vertebra and tails the size of trees, so they apply the laws of biology and physics to the digital versions. Next to the big silver dinosaur is a computer screen that gives visitors a chance to play puppet master to the digital version.

So, if I touch the screen to begin,I've got a couple options to see how these guys would move. You can give him a little poke 17 in the rib 7 cage, and see how he moves. And you can see it much more clearly since he doesn't have flesh on him. He's just metallic-looking bones.

The Apatosaurus on the screen wiggles and the spine 18 undulates. You can do the same on another screen next to a life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex. Naturally the exhibit has to have one of the big carnivores. But there's also a six-foot model of a T-rex that actually walks, just the way scientists believe the real one did/. What visitors are supposed to learn here is that being big wasn't easy. T-rex was not fast, it was too heavy. Apatosaurus may have had necks like giraffes', but they could not lift them the way giraffes do, because their necks were too long and heavy.

The exhibit's curator is paleontologist Mark Norell. He helped find or identify many of the fossils of these animals. He says he hopes visitors also will learn something about the process themselves.

You know we just don't go out like collecting a bunch of stuff and sort of describeit. We go out with certain questions in mind when we collect data. And also that the answer is changing all the time as the question is. So I mean you know there are no real truth in science, it's just simply the best answer at the time with the data that you have.

After the exhibit finishes its run in New York City, it goes on the road.

Christopher Choice, NPR News.

And if you want to find photos of the new exhibit, go to our website: npr.org.