Dinosaurs on Tour

Four tons of rare Russian and Mongolian dinosaurs were scattered across the carpet of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum like remains in some subterranean fossil bone bed. Giant shoulder blades emerged from bubble wrap; yard-long hoops of rib cage from cradles of foam.

The tawny skull of a toothsome tarbosaurus--the predatory Asian cousin of tyrannosaurus rex--found a temporary resting place atop one of the 23 wooden crates that housed the bones, its fangs snaggled only slightly in shipment. On a work table rested the head of a reptilian wart hog that snuffled through fern forests 255 million years ago. A life-size model of a velociraptor balanced on its back, its three-inch talons pointing up at the air. A dinosaur hatchling was cradled in straw.

One giant bone at a time, technicians Wayne Chatwin and Gerald Schnitzhofer spent 10 days assembling what time and nature had rent asunder--the long-extinct creatures that inhabit the museum’s newest exhibit, “The Great Russian Dinosaurs.”

It is the county museum’s first major new exhibition of dinosaurs--and in this case their predecessors as well--in almost a decade.

The international exhibit, which opened Saturday and runs through May 2, features meticulous casts of 17 complete skeletons and 22 skulls from Moscow’s Paleontological Institute, as well as fossils from the county museum’s collections. It is a collaboration of the Moscow Institute and two Australian science centers, the Monash Science Centre and the Queen Victoria Museum, which prepared the casts.

“North American museum-goers and dinosaur aficionados don’t get much opportunity to see dinosaurs from Asia,” said exhibit curator J.D. Stewart. “It is generally only in traveling exhibits [like this] that people get that opportunity.”

The exhibit is designed to take museum-goers across the threshold of time to a moment millions of years before the earliest dinosaurs, when the planet was a cooler, more arid orb and the dominant life forms were strange mammal-like reptiles and amphibians. Those creatures, which thrived 245 million to 290 million years ago, were the ancestors of all modern mammals, including human beings.

Dinosaurs, which also form part of the exhibition, gained ascendancy only when those creatures were devastated in a sweeping extinction event that wiped out 95% of all marine species and many of the life forms on land, Stewart said. In turn, more than 100 million years later, the dinosaurs would become extinct, clearing the way for the rise of mammals and, eventually, human civilization.

The new exhibit spans both ancient eras, telling a story of evolution and change illustrated by fossils collected over the last two centuries near the Ural Mountains of Russia and in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.

“We tried to develop what the world was like at that time and why it changed,” said exhibit organizer Patricia Vickers-Rich, who is director of the Monash Science Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

“You can follow the development of major faunas through time. You can look at bones, at skin impressions, at eggs. There is even a mummified duckbill dinosaur tail,” she said. The exhibition also offers a glimpse of the drastically different climates in which the creatures thrived. “It was greenhouse for the dinosaurs and icehouse for the mammal-like reptiles.”

Highlights of the exhibit include:

* The complete skeleton of a 45-foot-long, carnivorous tarbosaurus, mounted to show it in full pursuit of a speedy, 12-foot-long, ostrich-like dinosaur called gallimimus. The tarbosaurus specimen includes a cast of the inside of the creature’s skull.

* Clutches of dinosaur eggs showing how the largest dinosaurs that ever lived--the long-necked sauropods--began life as hatchlings small enough to hold in the hand. Although bones from these dinosaurs have been found on almost every continent, eggs have been found in just three places: Mongolia, France and Argentina. The eggs on display were laid in a depression in what became the Gobi Desert sands 75 million years ago.

* Skeletons of an adult and a baby protoceratops--one of the best-known dinosaurs and the ancestor of the three-horned triceratops on permanent display in the museum’s rotunda. The fossils from which the exhibit was cast are 75 million years old and were discovered in Mongolia.

* A collection of mammal-like reptiles that held sway on Earth 245 million to 290 million years ago, before the rise of the dinosaurs. The specimens, from Russia, include a predatory, bearlike reptile with five-inch saber teeth and a warmblooded, horned reptile the size of a modern rhinoceros.

* Ancient fish and sea lizards from the county museum’s collection, including a 92-million-year-old fossil clam that is three feet across and a piranha-like creature that is the largest ray-finned fish that ever lived.

* A working paleontology laboratory where museum technician Gary Takeuchi will be working to free the remarkably complete skeleton of a large hadrosaur dinosaur from the tons of rock that encase its 65-million-year-old bones. The specimen was collected in Edmonton, Canada.

Stewart expects visitors to come away with a better appreciation of the variety of life on ancient Earth as well as a broader perspective on how major groups of those exotic creatures evolved.

But Vickers-Rich and those who organized the traveling exhibit hope to come away with enough money--from the show’s share of museum admission fees--to help underwrite more research in Australia and the salaries of about 200 scientists at the Moscow Institute.

Like many scientific endeavors trying to stay afloat in Russia’s stormy economy today, the institute is so strapped for cash that it often cannot pay its staff scientists for months at a time. The exhibition, which has been traveling in various forms since 1993, has raised about $3 million to help fund new research.

“The Russians are so desperate now for funding for science,” said Vickers-Rich.

So much, in fact, that the Moscow Institute now offers its life-size, scientifically accurate casts for sale to collectors. A copy of the giant tarbosaurus, Vickers-Rich said, can be bought for about $42,000.