Smithsonian opens new dinosaur exhibit this month

WASHINGTON — Without question, dinosaurs are the main attraction at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, but a remodeling project has
left many of the skeletons displaced, and a new hall to display them won’t be
finished until 2019.

“In the meantime, we need to have a dinosaur presence at the Museum,” says
exhibit developer Sally Love Connell. “Because what is natural history without
a few dinosaurs?”

Now, a new exhibit, “The Last American Dinosaurs: Discovering a Lost World,”
looks to showcase two of the Museum’s most popular — and massive —
dinosaurs, while also telling a more in-depth story of how and when they
lived.

It centers around two of the Museums’ titans, which are posed in a way that
suggests they may be ready to square off. Visitors will first see the Museum’s
massive triceratops skeleton. “We have it juxtaposed here with the other
dominant dinosaur in this ecosystem, T-Rex,” says curator Hans-Dieter Sues.

More than just displaying those dinosaurs and others, the exhibit looks to
serve as a snapshot of how the final dinosaurs in North America lived before
they went extinct about 66 million years ago.

“This is sort of recreating the world just before this huge rock fell from the
sky,” Sues says.

The dinosaurs in the exhibit come from a fossil-rich area that includes parts
of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. Those behind the exhibit wanted to
re-create that landscape and were able to find something similar at a creek in
southern Maryland.

A photo of the creek was turned into a mural, and animals from the past were
added, including a large plant-eating dinosaur and a pterodactyl.

“But then you see familiar animals,” including a turtle, an alligator, and a
relative of the opossum, which were alive at the same time, Seus says. “It was
sort of a world that at once was somewhat familiar but in some ways oddly
different.”

The exhibit opens to the public on Nov. 25.

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