The following is my latest Sunday column on museums. The idea for it came
directly from museums that contacted me after I last posted a message on this
list.
My next column will be on Andy Warhol and his connection to museums. I welcome
information about any especially noteworthy or odd Warhol exhibition you know
of, past, present, or future..

ON MUSEUMS / The Dinosaur Clears Its Throat: Honk!


JONATHAN MANDELL




A DINOSAUR will speak later this week in New Mexico for the first time
in 75 million years. Perhaps it will say: "Enough already!"
    When paleontologists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and
Science unearthed in 1995 the well-preserved fossil skull of a
Parasaurolophus, otherwise known as a duck-billed dinosaur, they brought
it to a local hospital, which performed a CAT scan, and then to a
computer scientist from Sandia National Laboratories who spent two years
working out thousands of equations  -  having to do with anatomy and
airflow, etc.  -  on a computer they say "is sometimes used for nuclear
weapons work."
    The museum won't reveal the computer-generated sound gleaned from
all this research until Friday, but a highlyattuned observer might be
able to hazard a deeply intuitive guess: The museum describes the
duck-billed dinosaur's crest as "shaped something like a trombone."
    There are many mysteries that remain about dinosaurs, but the reason
why a museum would go to such lengths for a dubious honk is not one of
them. About 140 years after the first dinosaur was unearthed in North
America and displayed to great success in a museum, setting off a Great
Bone Rush, we are in the midst of an even greater one. Indeed, that's
why the New Mexico museum was created, in 1986. "New Mexico is one of
the three states [the others are Colorado and Utah] richest in dinosaur
fossils," explains John Arnold of the museum. "The thinking was: Why let
it all go to the American Museum of Natural History? Why not put it on
display in New Mexico?"
    What New Mexico is doing is small pterodactyls compared to the Field
Museum of Chicago, which last month purchased at Sotheby's auction a
Tyrannosaurusrex named Sue for $8.4 million. It was the first T-rex
skeleton of the 22 found since 1905 to be auctioned at all, and it
fetched by far the most money ever paid for bones.
    Though all 300 bones won't be ready until the year 2000, a handful
of Sue is already being put to use at the impatient museum: An exhibit
entitled "Sue Uncrated" opened this month  with free admission for
anyone else named Sue.
    The two corporate mammoths that supplied much of the money for the
purchase, Disney and McDonald's, will make three full-size reproductions
 -  two for a millennial tour, the third for Disney World's Dinoland.
    "This sends a bad message," says Donald Wolberg, a paleontologist at
the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. "It puts a price tag on
knowledge. McDonald's is selling burgers, Disney's selling Dinoland.
Meanwhile, there's less than a million dollars spent a year in the whole
world on paleontology research."
    Wolberg is the father of Dinofest. He held a Dinofest in Tempe,
Ariz., and a second Dinofest in Bloomington, Ind. His third Dinofest
will run for a month in Philadelphia, starting March 27, sponsored by
the Academy of Natural Sciences, which will reopen its Dinosaur Hall at
the same time after a $4-million renovation.
    "Dinofest will be the largest collection of dinosaurs ever exhibited
in one place anywhere in the world: 100 individual, complete dinosaurs,
and 100 more spare parts  -  skulls and legs," Wolberg says. "I've got
dinosaurs coming from around the world  -  from Mongolia, from Africa."
    Dinofest promises to be, as one insider puts it, "a weird hybrid of
academics and commercialism"  -  a scientific symposium with a keynote
address by Stephen Jay Gould, coupled with a dinosaur art show and a
"Dinofeast banquet . . . only food that was available during the age of
the dinosaurs: things like ferns, alligator, shark, twigs and nuts."
    Those untrained in paleontology and marketing might not understand
the distinction between Dinofest and Dinoland. But Wolberg is adamant:
"Dinofest uses the popularity of dinosaurs to get across principles of
science."
    Meanwhile, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan,
which exactly 100 years ago unearthed the first of its 2,000 dinosaur
fossils  -  "the world's largest and most important collection,"
according to the museum, although only about 100 specimens are on
display in the recentlyrenovated halls  -  a barosaurus makes a low
roar, a subtle hiss, a piercing screech. This, though, is just part of a
three-minute animated video, which argues that dinosaur sounds are only
one of the many things about dinosaurs that their fossils can't tell us.
There's less debate over what dinosaur fossils say about humans.




Copyright 1997, Newsday Inc.
Copyright 1997, Newsday Inc