Dinosaur
Discovery Museum
News
Carnotaurus installation complete
Carnotaurus, the "flesh-eating bull," a 20th century dinosaur species was added to the Museum's collection of meat-eating dinosaurs. The skeleton is 25 feet long and 6.5 feet tall at the hips. The almost-compete fossilized skeleton was found in Patagonia, Argentina.
A soundscape of environmental and animal sounds has been added to the exhibit gallery that will take you back in time to the Mesozoic era. Visitors will hear the outdoor sounds in different terrains and weather conditions of the Age of Dinosaurs.
Dr. Thomas Carr
From T.rex to Chickens:
Meat Eating Dinosaurs Share History with Birds
At first glance, the towering model of T.rex, a dinosaur, appears to have little in common with the skeleton of an eagle hovering overhead at the Dinosaur Discovery Museum. But take a closer look, and the exhibit shows the many ways that today's birds share a history rooted millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Dr. Thomas Carr, curator of the exhibit, says, "I can see the dinosaur in birds. That's the goal of the gallery."
Carr says the premises of the exhibit is the evolution of birds, demonstrated through meat eating dinosaurs, and is supported by scientific evidence.
Car, assistant professor of biology at Carthage College, is director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology, located in the Dinosaur Discovery Museum. His specialty is research involving the evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest relatives.
Carr says the museum exhibit has more therapods (meat eating dinosaurs) on display than the top natural history museums in the country. Nine of the dinosaur models are only seen at the Kenosha exhibit. The dinosaurs on display were created by making casts of dinosaur bones. The lighter colored bones represent bones that have been found, while the darker colored pieces were sculpted to fill in the missing gaps. The 18 dinosaur models on display represent a variety of species from all over the world including South and North America, Africa, China, Mongolia, and Europe.
The Dinosaur Discovery Museum opened in August 2006. Dinosaurs are arranged in sequence to show the development of features we associate with birds, including feathers, wishbones, and breathing systems.
Most meat eating dinosaurs, Carr says, had a system of air sacs extending from their lungs--a system birds retain. Their one-way system of breathing is more efficient than the way humans and other mammals breathe.
Curator of education at the Dinosaur Discovery Museum, Chris DeSantis, leads programs that help draw the connections between the changes over time in various species. Museum exhibits answer the most common questions about dinosaurs including the theory of extinction, related to an asteroid impact that raised so much dust it blocked out sunlight. Plants died, then plant eating dinosaurs died from a lack of their food source. The only dinosaurs that ultimately survived were the flying therapods, who became the first birds.
Active research continues at the Museum, where the Carthage Institute of Paleontology is located. Carr regularly participates in paleontological digs in Southeastern Montana to collect dinosaur bones. Those finds, including bones from the youngest T.rex ever discovered, are on display on the lower level of the building.