Tail Bone Connecteth to the Spinal Bone; That’s the Making of a Dinosaur

The 94-foot blue whale dives forever into nothingness, its hairy, stuffed neighbors frozen midstride at what generations of schoolchildren have known as the dinosaur museum.

Now in its 125th year, one of the world’s leading science museums has awakened to find itself in the midst of the information age. It’s not just the dry bones of science on show these days at the American Museum of Natural History.

Today tiny, filmed projections of archeologists stroll about a model dig explaining their work. Nearby, students roll joysticks on video games explaining how humans came to be.

Don’t fear for the dinosaurs, though. They’re still here, as are the strips of soil mounted behind glass--”actual sections dug from the ground”--along with Teddy Roosevelt’s hats, Margaret Mead’s walking stick and the display on the life cycle of a blood fluke.

In one hallway, the preserved badger still snuffles into its Wyoming den, while in a darkened room nearby, the latest in a decades-long line of toddlers stands transfixed before the African Buffalo--”Wow, look how big they are!”

“We’re going to preserve those things that make it a beloved institution,” President Ellen V. Futter promised in a recent interview at the pink neo-Gothic castle looming over Central Park.

Futter, who came to the museum late in 1993 from her post as head of Barnard College, is mustering its resources to benefit the 3 million-plus visitors who roam annually through its 24 interconnected buildings sprawling over 18 acres.

Her goal: “Enhancing the science literacy of the entire nation.”

It is a lofty one. A museum poll last year found that nearly half the adults surveyed do not think humans evolved from earlier species. And 35% believe humans once lived alongside dinosaurs. (When dinosaurs ranged the Earth, that which would become human was a tiny furry mammal scratching in the underbrush.)

Futter is also eager to raise the museum’s profile in debates on the issues of the day, from conservation and biodiversity to multiculturalism, and to publicize its role as a research center.

“It all speaks to our underlying purpose, which is not only to understand the world better but for each of us to understand our place in the world more effectively,” Futter said.

One floor up from her office, the two sunwashed new halls meant to carry visitors along mammals’ evolutionary tree of life are packed with the bones of mammals and their extinct relatives.

The unusual evolutionary approach means humans are grouped with one of their closest relatives: the bat.

The new halls feature videotapes of scientists explaining their work and interactive computer stations bulging with data on mammals and their environment and explanations on finding, collecting, preparing and studying fossils.

About 250 creatures, a minuscule percentage of the museum’s collection of fossil mammals, are on display. All told, the museum houses 30 million specimens and artifacts.

The first embryo of a meat-eating dinosaur ever found lies curled inside its egg at the heart of a display that pulls together the scope of scientific endeavor with the museum’s own history and vast collection.

A videotape of a scientist talking about finding the embryo plays along with footage of the 1923 museum expedition that turned up the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, also in the Gobi desert.

Another example of what’s new is the overhauled exhibit on human biology and evolution. It ranges from the structure of DNA to the blossoming of art in the Ice Age. In one particularly cheeky display just past the hologram that replaced the plastic Transparent Woman, a skeleton family and their skeleton dog watch a non-skeletal baseball player talk about muscles and joints on a non-skeletal television.

Farther along, Lucy strides through a diorama with another Australopithecus afarensis at her side. It’s a grand replication of the stroll that could have created the Tanzanian footprints showing that pre-humans reared up on their hind legs to walk.

The display on our distant ancestors includes casts of some few fragments of what scientists can actually call evidence: four jawbones, a femur and a cranium.

Electronic innovations include Expeditions, an audio guide with a twist. Strolling through any of the museum’s 40 permanent exhibition halls triggers a narrative overview complete with sound effects and music.

The inaugural installment of the guide is “Treasures From 125 Years of Discovery”: Just key in the code for any of the 50 treasures you can learn about, listen, walk and look. At the selected treasure, hear stories from an actor representing someone involved with it.

Arctic explorer Adm. Robert Edwin Peary, for example, talks about finding the 34-ton Cape York meteorite and delivering it to the museum in 1897.

Another treasure, the cream-striped Tasmanian Wolf, serves as an example of convergent evolution (it looks like a wolf-dog but it’s really a marsupial like the opossum), and as an object lesson in biodiversity: It hasn’t been spotted in decades and it’s thought that humans wiped it from the Earth.

Still, serious as all this educational activity sounds, Futter insists on just one thing: “I am pro-fun.”