A Double Dip Into the World of Dinosaurs : Arts: The great ‘thunder lizards’ get their due in a pair of linked shows at the Natural History Museum in which art and science are ecstatically joined.

Dinosaurs, in addition to being many children’s first fascinated brush with science, are clearly the beasts of the moment.

It will be interesting to see the reach of a stunning pair of exhibits just opened at the Natural History Museum. From the audiences I’ve been with on sunny Sundays in Exposition Park, I suspect that Los Angeles art lovers are used to making their discoveries on more accustomed turf--the County Museum of Art, the Getty or high-profile galleries. Will they detour to revel in the dinosaurs? They had better--or their children will never forgive them.

The museum’s shop even has chocolate dinosaur eggs, complete with hatchlings, for children who like the idea of munching up the young.

Dinosaur bones have been one of the Natural History Museum’s draws for decades, but we are in a true dino-frenzy today, it seems, between recent scientific findings and public fascination with the great “thunder lizards.”

When you can find it, you can watch “Dinosaurs” on television: an animatronic dinosaur family vaguely like “The Honeymooners,” featuring Earl, a megalosaur; his wife, Fran, an allosaurus; and Earl’s best buddy Roy, a tyrannosaur.

You can have a swooningly fanciful dinosaur mural painted to order for your child’s bedroom walls.

And you can pick from among 200-some children’s books on dinosaurs, a few of which are even accurate and readable.

In the fall we’ll have “Dinosaur!” a four-part all-inclusive series from Britain’s Granada television that will explain it all--dinosaurs from discovery to theories of disappearance.

Scheduled to begin some time in 1992 is Steven Spielberg’s filming of “Jurassic Park,” Michael Crichton’s terrifying supposition that mixes dinosaurs with humans on a present-day theme park island off Costa Rica.

Adorable or terrifying by turns, dinosaurs have lumbered through movies since there were movies, from the silents’ endearing Gertie to the ground-shaking, bellowing monsters of “Fantasia” and from “Godzilla” to, heaven help us, “Baby.”

Saturday morning television has made dinosaurs into adorable green bath toys, cute and cuddly; movies have played fast and loose with their dates so that the heroine of prehistory, her pelt bikini endangered, could fight off a looming brontosaurus or two.

Today’s 7-year-olds hoot at mistakes like that. They even know that one no longer says brontosaurus; it’s apatosaurus. We’ve lost the lovely eohippus (Dawn Horse) too, now properly and horridly called hyracotherium (Shrew Beast).

The last 10 to 15 years have seen astounding clusters of fossil discoveries that have revealed more than we’ve known before about dinosaurs, from the very texture of their skin and formation of their bones and musculature, to the way they reared their young and roamed the Earth--and the shape of that Earth, too.

High time for the great lizards to get back their majesty and stake their authenticity. And no better place today than at the Natural History Museum, in Exposition Park, at a pair of linked shows in which art and science are ecstatically joined.

The paintings, drawings and sculptures of “Dinosaurs Past and Present” and “Dinosaurs--A World View,” are bookends: “Past and Present” is the art and information of the past; “A World View” is the most current scientific knowledge, given dramatic rendering by a quartet of the field’s outstanding illustrators and sculptors.

“Dinosaurs Past and Present” is a local show that made good. Five years ago, this collection of 156 paintings, drawings and sculptures, curated by author-artist Sylvia Czerkas and commissioned by Natural History Museum director Craig Black, left to travel to museums in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Back through August for one last visit before being dismantled, it’s a lavish, unfettered look at how the art of the day reflected scientific thought and, in turn, put a particular vision of the dinosaurs into the popular mind.

In 1851, for example, it was almost sideshow time, to judge from a view of 21 of Britain’s scientific nabobs dining “within the skull of the monster” before tottering off to the inauguration of the Crystal Palace Exhibition. The monster was a half-finished sculpture of an “Iguanodon” by the day’s famous artist, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and you can see these dazzled elite, like so many bibulous Jonahs on the half shell, in a little lithograph on a side wall.

Moving on, you’ll find the extraordinary drawings of Charles R. Knight, who worked through the 1930s. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ll recognize Knight’s work: His murals at New York’s American Museum of Natural History probably stamped dinosaurs into the minds of at least two generations of museum-goers; his books, “Before the Dawn of History” and “Prehistoric Man” took care of the world outside New York. Knight’s dinosaurs lived, they leaped on one another with startling animation, and since he worked closely with paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, it was art with true scientific backbone.

Here too, is a reproduction of the great, delicately colored Yale mural by Rudolph Zallinger, “The Age of Reptiles,” which created a new generation of dinosaur addicts when Life magazine reproduced it as a pull-out in the 1950s.

In “Past and Present” Czerkas excluded no artist’s theory, however wild. So you’ll see dinosaurs with red, black and white coloration that suggests that vast eyes had been painted between their horns, presumably to frighten their foes, a little like the trick in one of the Babar books of painting fierce faces on the retreating side of the elephants. The same artist also posits dinosaurs with feathers, nothing if not an intriguing idea. I must say that these scant, frowzy black-top feathers, combined with a few teeth peeking out from under their upper lips, give these behemoths an engagingly goofy look.

Also here, in another collaboration between an artist and a paleontologist, is the fascinating projection of what dinosaurs might have grown into, had they not become extinct. The model of a graceful, attenuated lizard-like dinosaur (stenonychosaurus), which had a relatively large brain and stereoscopic vision, nuzzles next to an intelligent dinosauroid, with enormous eyes, erect on two legs.

The new show, “Dinosaurs--A Global View” has been organized by Czerkas and her husband, artist-paleontologist Stephen Czerkas. Fourteen of the Czerkas sculptures span both exhibits, but it’s Stephen’s newest sculpture that may steal this show, in kids’ eyes. Built accurately, as all the artist’s sculptures are, from skeleton to musculature to skin, the 20-foot-long, 8-foot-tall, 1,500-pound styracosaurus is breathtaking. The circle patterns of its wrinkled skin are more intricate than any ostrich-skin leather--fossil skin is one of Stephen Czerkas’ specialties. The beast’s huge, intent eyes, which seem to follow you, are a glowing, root beer color.

It’s nice to know that the scholarship of the four “Global View” artists is as up-to-date as it is, because the drama of their images will drive them straight to the deepest level of young psyches. It’s the artist who brings the stillness, the aggression, even the unexpected tenderness of these animals alive. Among the 74 paintings and drawings created just for this show by Mark Hallet, Douglas Henderson and John Sibbick, and the sculptures by both Czerkases are such indelible visions as a painting of two drowned dinosaurs--styracosaurs again, with their headdress-like array of horns--floating, vast and weightless, in the dim light filtering down from the water’s surface. Or the bursting motion as an amphibian dinosaur thrusts upward toward his prey on the surface of the water, trailing clouds of the bottom silt in which he’s been hiding.

“A Global View,” which originates here, will go at the end of August to Arizona, then over the next three years to Switzerland, Ireland, Japan and Canada. It’s the pairing of the two shows which strike such sparks, giving the event a rare resonance.