Endangered Dinosaurs : Robotics: Changes in the financial climate have Dinamation thinking about new means of survival.

From a warren of offices next to a stable here, Dinamation shepherds a herd of 500 dinosaurs around the world.

Robot dinosaurs, actually--the sort of machines that can stand more than three stories high, roar, roll their eyes, gnash their teeth and otherwise delight crowds.

But things aren’t quite so amusing at the company itself: Dinamation International Corp. has laid off more than 30 people since last year; its customers are starting to negotiate tougher, less profitable deals; and the company is finding it difficult to procure loans to expand.

Dinamation caters to an unusual market: museums. And museums are having their own problems these days.

Changes in federal tax laws mean that private donations are not increasing. Government and corporate giving has not kept pace with inflation, and the money that is being granted must be spread ever thinner among a growing number of museums.

Funding for the nation’s museums is, in short, at a “critical stage,” says the American Assn. of Museums.

That’s where outfits such as Dinamation come in. To get more people in the door and to compete with television, amusement parks and the other distractions of modern life, museums have turned to jazzed-up traveling exhibits such as ones that use the robotic dinosaurs.

Some of the more august institutions may look down their nose at this show-biz approach and sniff at the idea of charging museum visitors any admission at all. But many museums--particularly smaller ones in out-of-the-way cities--can’t afford to ignore the kinds of crowds the dinosaurs often bring--some museums have seen their attendances triple or even quadruple--or the revenue those crowds can generate.

“More museums are being forced to consider admission fees,” says Edward H. Able, executive director of the American Assn. of Museums, who estimates that half the nation’s approximately 8,000 museums do not charge admission. “It’s difficult for museums to accept that because our role is to serve the broadest possible public.

“But with some museums closing their doors one day a week for lack of funds, they’ve had to face realities.”

Most traveling exhibits are mounted by museums, which charge the other museums that are on the tour stops. The hope for these tours is that, as with the hugely successful King Tut exhibit of the ‘70s, people who have not set foot in a museum in years will visit.

There are dozens of traveling exhibits on the road right now. One is the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History’s “Space Spinoffs,” which visited Los Angeles this spring. It showed everyday items such as super-absorbent diapers that have been derived from space technology.

Dinamation, however, is one of the few companies to make a business with touring shows.

It usually works like this: Dinamation takes its costs off the top from the ticket sales, then splits the remainder 50-50 with the museum. The profit figures for the museum can vary wildly, depending on how many people the exhibit draws, the expenses the museum incurs in running the exhibit and other variables. At least one museum contacted by The Times--the San Bernardino County Museum--says it lost money on a Dinamation show of prehistoric sea creatures that was plagued by technical problems and received spotty publicity. (The company says it has since worked the bugs out of that exhibit.)

The museums, for their part, are wising up to this relatively new game; they’ve started making tougher deals. Take the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, for instance. Instead of splitting the take with Dinamation, the museum will pay a flat rate to lease the dinosaurs and will pocket the gate for itself for its next show, which is scheduled for 1993.

Cleveland offers a good example of another Dinamation problem: When the museum hosted the dinosaur exhibit for the first time, in 1987, the turnout was phenomenal: 400,000 people visited the museum during the three months the show was there (typical museum attendance was only about 350,000 for a whole year). But by the second time around, in 1989, the thrill was gone--the attendance was disappointing. So the museum decided to wait four years before putting on the show again.

“I think we did the second show too soon,” says Larry Isard, the museum’s assistant director. “I compare it to Disney films; they wait years for a whole new generation of kids before putting out one of their old movies on video again.”

In short, the museum market can get an overdose of dinosaurs. And that means Dinamation has to come up with something else to sell them. And that takes money.

As it was trying to decide what kind of robots to make next, the company laid off more than 30 workers from its Tustin factory. The savings from the layoffs, which began last fall, will be put into the large upfront costs for designing and building prototypes of complicated robots of other types of fauna.

For Dinamation, as for many smaller companies, borrowing that much money would be tough in these recessionary times.

Actually, it has never been easy for Dinamation to borrow, the company says. Dinamation’s is an unusual business, and its collateral--the dinosaurs--are wandering the world in some 40-odd traveling exhibits. That’s not the sort of sure bet the average banker goes for. So rather than borrow, Dinamation says, it has taken the slower route to growth, mostly by using its surplus cash. “There are good revenues to be made in this business,” says Chris Mays, Dinamation president and chief executive officer, “but we’re not a runaway growth company of the sort you’d find in Silicon Valley. Our growth hasn’t been in a straight line.”

Mays, 56, is a youthful-looking, dapper man. On a recent weekday morning, he was decked out in a crisp blue shirt with a white collar and a paisley tie in muted blues. He operates out of a small, two-story Spanish-style office building of stucco and red tile in San Juan Capistrano a stone’s throw from the freeway. The company, which now has about 100 employees, will soon be moving north to the giant Irvine Spectrum office and industrial park, where it recently signed an eight-year, $3-million lease for larger quarters. The factory will remain in Tustin.

Mays was an airline pilot bored with the job when in 1982 a friend showed him a brochure from a Japanese company that made robotic dinosaurs. There might be money to be made here, they thought. Mays thought about who might want dinosaurs, and he came up with what turned out to be a pretty good answer--museums. He found five friends to put up $20,000 each to start a company that would market the dinosaurs in the United States.

At first, when the dinosaurs were a novelty, you could just unload them at the museum door and collect your money.

But in the late 1980s, museums got a little pickier about matters such as whether the dinosaurs were really as anatomically accurate as possible. In the early days, the robotic creatures were not very accurate.

“Those creatures were robotically very nice,” says Doug Ashley, Dinamation’s senior director of manufacturing operations, “but aesthetically they had some problems. Some of them looked like Godzilla.”

Complaints started coming in from the museums, which, after all, are supposed to be in the business of educating, not entertaining.

Mays, in the meantime, had decided to go out on his own, hoping to make more money by building his own dinosaurs. In 1985 he split from his Japanese supplier, Kokoro Co. Ltd., and began making dinosaurs.

Mays says the two parted ways “amicably,” although he hired a patent lawyer just to cover the bases when he started making his own robots. But the split left some hard feelings at Kokoro, now the competition, which says that Dinamation copies its dinosaurs’ inner workings.

“These days everybody copies us, so it’s not unusual,” says Jun Shimizu, president of operations for Kokoro’s Los Angeles-based U.S. unit, fuming. “But a handshake should count for something.”

Kokoro, a subsidiary of a Tokyo toy and candy maker called Sanrio Co., says it too has more than 40 exhibits on the road. Kokoro, which also makes vending machines, says its dinosaurs account for about $10 million a year in revenue; Dinamation, which is privately held, claims about $12 million.

Now that the name of the game is anatomical accuracy, each company snipes at the other’s robotic reptiles. And each has big-name paleontologists who will vouch for its dinosaurs.

Dinamation has, among others, Robert T. Bakker, a University of Colorado paleontologist who is widely known in the field--although not always agreed with--for his controversial theories on dinosaurs.

Kokoro has John R. Horner, curator of paleontology at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., who was not formally trained as a paleontologist but who has made news with some spectacular fossil finds.

In fact, there is still a good bit of debate as to whether Dinamation has taken some liberties with its “creatures,” as the company calls them, in order to jazz up its exhibitions. Because paleontologists are basically working with only the bones of animals that have been extinct for millions of years, there is some question, for instance, about the bright blues and reds it paints the skins of some of its dinosaurs. A more traditional view holds that dinosaurs probably had skins of dull green or black.

There are also debates over the roars that the robots emit. Scientists can, of course, only guess at what sort of noises, if any, dinosaurs made. Those sorts of liberties have kept both companies’ creations out of museums such as the venerable American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The museum’s curators “recognize the entertainment value and the role the dinosaurs play in stimulating people’s curiosity,” says Lowell Dingus, a paleontologist now at work renovating the halls that house the museum’s large fossil collection.

“We haven’t had the exhibit here, though,” Dingus said, “because whether dinosaurs had brightly colored skins or the noises they made are not things we want to make people think we know the answers to.”

What is ahead for Dinamation? The company will decide soon whether to build more types of dinosaurs or to branch out into robotic whales or even giant insects.

No easy undertaking, this. It takes nine months and a lot of money to go from a conception to a production model for a new creature. And once the assembly line starts turning them out, it costs between $30,000 and $40,000 apiece for a typical dinosaur.

Although they are built to require minimum maintenance and in such a way that they can be squeezed into trucks to travel from museum to museum, their average life span is between five and six years.

In addition, the competition promises to get tougher, with several companies said to be considering plunging into the museum exhibit business with their own dinosaurs.

On the other hand, dinosaurs are not likely to go out of style any time soon. Nobody, even Dinamation, seems quite sure why each new generation of 5-year-olds is fascinated by creatures that died out millions of years ago.

“Our best guess is it has something to do with their size,” says Dinamation’s Mays, whose creatures have toured 140 museums around the world, most in batches of about 10. “And they’re not here today, so they remain mystical and non-threatening.”

And as the museum business gets tougher, Dinamation is branching out into the theme-park market. It is sinking millions of dollars into a small park in Hawaii that exhibits native Hawaiian plants and animals.

This is to make sure the company itself doesn’t become extinct.

The company eschews amusement parks, though, since those might spoil the animals’ hard-won educational cachet, and also because the animals are a little tame for most amusement parks.

“In order to survive, we want to be more than the people who bring in the rubber dinosaurs,” Mays says.

Then there’s a bigger question: What about the company’s main market, the museums themselves? It seems likely most will continue to go in for splashy exhibits that draw large crowds.

Even the American Museum of Natural History has been talking to special effects companies that work for the movie industry to perk up its exhibits.

Dinosaur Data

Sizes: Range from dimetrodon , 5 feet long from nose to tail and 4 feet tall, to Tyrannosaurus rex , 47 feet long from head to tail and up to 33 feet tall.

Weight: Dimetrodon weighs 600 pounds; T. rex weighs in at 2 tons.

Cost: $30,000 to $40,000 each.

Life Span: 5 to 6 years.

Number: More than 1,000 worldwide; divided about equally between Dinamation and competitor Kokoro Ltd. of Japan

Revenue: Dinamation, $12 million annually; Kokoro, $10 million annually

Dinosaur Robotics

1. Sound

The dinosaur’s mouth movements are synchronized with roars emitted by a set of speakers camouflaged in the creature’s base.

2. Lifelike Skin

Dinamation’s dinosaurs have thick, lifelike skins of molded foam rubber. Making the skin begins with a full-size clay sculpture of the dinosaur, which is covered with a liquid plastic. The plastic hardens into a shell that is removed in several pieces, and liquid foam rubber is then poured into the molds. When the “skin” dries, it is wrapped around the dinosaur’s skeleton.

3. Computer Control

The base of each creature contains air valves, a sound system and a small computer. The computer--the size of a shoe box--controls the flow of air that drives the dinosaur’s movements, which are carefully choreographed to make the dinosaur move in a lifelike way.

4. Robotic Skeletoon

Piston-and-cylinder devices powered by compressed air generate movement. A network of small tubes forces air into the cylinders, causing the pistons to move. Large cylinders are connected to the arms and body, while tiny cylinders control the eyes and mouth.

Source: Dinamation.