Randy Lyons Presents…

“Digging Dinosaurs” presents those aspects of dinosaur exploration and discovery that really interest people:

From my 10 years of field experience, I tell you how it actually feels:

to spend weeks in the blistering heat and dust of the Badlands.
to meet that rattlesnake or scorpion you really weren’t expecting.
to look for (and find!) exciting fossil remains of dinosaurs and other animals that are over 70 million years old.
to spend hours — or days — carefully extracting these bones from the surrounding rock and transporting them to the museum.
to spend days — or weeks — gently cleaning and preparing them for storage or display.

If time and numbers permit, I wind up the program by inviting audience members to handle real dinosaur fossils and discover how easy it is to tell the difference between bone and rocks. How do you know it’s really dinosaur bone? Find out for yourself!

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Randy Lyons Presents

Dino Fun Facts
Why do natural history museums often display only dinosaur bones and not the complete animal?

click here for answer

On one hand, a plaster, fiberglass, or foam-rubber representation of what we think a dinosaur actually looked like can be an exciting display -- one that can capture the imagination of youngsters and grown-ups alike. And having them move and growl by mechanical means can add to this excitement.

On the other hand, we really don't know what color dinosaurs were -- whether they were a single color all over (like crocodiles) or had stripes or other patterns on their skin (like many lizards and snakes). We also don't know how fully muscled these animals were: some fully fleshed-out dinosaur recreations make them look chubby while others make the same animal look anemic.

And, by the way, we certainly don't know what kind of sounds dinosaurs made!

So the bones are really the only thing we have for sure -- and the argument can be made that a museum should only display what we are reasonably sure of, leaving the recreated dinosaurs to the amusement parks and movies.

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