A Magical Night Amid the Monsters in the Attic of Creation

It is midnight in the Mesozoic.

Jason from Ontario dozes under the duckbill dinosaur. Dakota from the Palisades is curled up under the allosaurus. Daniel from Diamond Bar and Nathanael from Santa Monica sleep by the hadrosaurus. Pillowed on air mattresses, Mario from Walnut and half a dozen other children nestle under the seemingly endless throat of a mamenchisaurus--the longest-necked dinosaur ever discovered.

All of us--15 boys, five girls and assorted mothers, fathers and aunts--are spending this particular Friday night in the dinosaur hall of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

My 7-year-old son, Michael, has unrolled his lime-green sleepover bag next to the skull of a tyrannosaurus rex. He pulls the bag up over his head, just inches from the serrated incisors lining the yard-long jaw above him, and drifts into sleep. He is a choice mammalian morsel stretched out beside the open mouth of the largest predator that ever walked the Earth.

“Night-night all my meat-eater friends,” Michael murmurs drowsily.

Once or twice a year, the museum organizes an overnight like this for children, featuring an evening of crafts, science activities and storytelling centered on its fossil collections and dinosaur exhibits. The museum curators playfully call the gathering a dino-snore.

At this moment, the darkened hall is vibrating with adult snoring so profoundly basso, so rhythmically sonorous and resonant that it requires no leap of the imagination to think it must be the deep breathing of a drowsing dinosaur.

Certainly, there is something magical about a museum after hours, when only shadows and a night watchman are afoot.

For me, this is a night in a place that encompasses 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history. By the curators’ count, there are 35 million specimens and artifacts in the museum’s collections, which document the evolution of life, culture and the cosmos.

To spend a night among them is to dream awhile in the attic of creation.

*

“Dinosaurs are a friendly scare,” the docent said earlier that evening to explain why such terrifying creatures should be so appealing to the very young.

If something large, fanged and covered with scales can win its way into the heart of almost every child, there also is something about the way adults have envisioned these denizens that embodies an aspect of ourselves.

In the Victorian era--when men of substance were so often men of considerable girth as well--scientists thought dinosaurs were sluggish, drab, potbellied beasts.

Today, as any child certainly knows, dinosaurs have undergone a full-body scientific make-over. They have been reborn in theory as hotblooded, buff creatures, so active as to seem on a caffeine buzz and so colorful as to seem tinted with mascara and body paint. Some even had feather headdresses, so the current thinking goes.

Indeed, these behemoths have become more than species; they are brands, with life-form logos that turn up on everything from coffee mugs to designer sheets.

In that light, extinction may have been a good career move.

Whatever adults make of it, however, the vanished realm of the dinosaurs offers many children a first step into a world so much larger than themselves--less frightening for all its fierceness, perhaps, than the adult world into which they are thrust.

Standing between the petrified turtle and the giant pterosaur, the museum docent hands out fossils to the children.

Max hefts the spike from a stegosaurus tail--almost as long as he is tall. Clare handles an ovoid dinosaur egg. Nick juggles the toe bone of a duckbill dinosaur. Caitlin examines a claw. B.J. carries the cast of a prehistoric footprint the size of his torso.

All of them are anxious to touch the 70-million-year-old dinosaur poop. The technical term for that is coprolite, one 7-year-old says knowledgeably.

In no time at all, the children are chipping away with rubber mallets and chisels to free toy dinosaurs encased in a plaster matrix. Soon they are making casts with modeling clay and plaster to better understand how time and geology can conspire to preserve the imprint of fragile bone and tissue. This is learning by doing.

When it is time, we make camp on the marble floor.

I read Michael a bedtime story--”The Sea Serpent’s Daughter”--by the light from the exhibit case containing the tyrannosaurus skull.

*

It is dawn in the Cretaceous--6 a.m. by my wristwatch.

When I sit up, I see a carnivorous carnotaurus bending over me, its jaws yawning wide and its eyes alight with what can only be glee. The 25-foot-high model of this 100-million-year-old predator from Argentina is almost too lifelike for this hour.

Wrapped in my sleeping bag, I feel like its breakfast in bed.

The museum awakens slowly. The security guards turn on the lights. The children stir. In the rotunda, coffee is brewing.

“I heard scary noises last night,” says Daniel in his pajamas and T-rex cap.

“Dinosaurs?” asks a nearby father.

“Nahhh,” says Daniel. “They’re dead.”

Even so, Daniel quickly changes the subject. “I have a loose tooth.”

My son Michael emerges from his sleeping bag. “How loose?”

As I roll up the sleeping pads, they dart in circles of tag around the museum’s Corinthian columns. Soon enough, it is time to leave.

“Whoever lives here is totally lucky,” Michael says as he skips down the museum steps. “They have real bones. They are totally lucky.”