'Dinosaurs Alive!' Thundering into Town

Mar 29, 07:41 AM

Current Headlines: By Lisa Crutchfield, Richmond Times-Dispatch

Mar. 29--Paleontologist wannabes will roar for the newest film at the Science Museum of Virginia's IMAX Dome.

"Dinosaurs Alive!" which opens tomorrow, features computer-generated animation that will satisfy any "Jurassic Park" fan -- more so because the figures will be five stories high on the IMAX giant screen.

Scenes in the film include a velociraptor and a protoceratops in a fight to the death, which occurs sooner than expected as a sand dune sweeps over them and preserves their remains for modern-day scientists.

But "Dinosaurs Alive!" isn't just the story of dinosaurs. It also tells how scientists discover artifacts and use them to study prehistoric life.

The film follows paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History on expeditions from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to the sandstone buttes of New Mexico.

"The film has neat educational components," said Summer Schultz, on-site programming director at the Science Museum of Virginia. "It talks about how they actually find the fossils, how they interpret them and how they can figure out a lot about an animal from a part of an animal."

A self-proclaimed dinosaur geek, Schultz said the film will appeal to "people who want to know how we know what we know."

"Dinosaurs Alive!" accompanies the museum's permanent Bone Zone exhibit, which features hands-on lessons about fossils, bones and paleontology.

Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m., amateur paleontologist Anne Woodruff will be in the Bone Zone, working on the scapula of an apatosaurus, discovered in 1998 in Shell, Wyo.

Visitors can learn about the tools she uses to clean and examine fossils and bones. She also will discuss her many expeditions to find fossils.

A Science Saturday program April 14 also will tie in to the new film. Visitors can play paleontologist for a day and simulate a dig for fossils, make casts and even examine the real thing.

Among the museum's collection of fossils are specimens of dinosaur teeth and bones, including the humerus of a stegosaur and the ischium of a camarasaur.

Contact staff writer Lisa Crutchfield at Lcrutchfield@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6362.

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