The beast looming from the billboard-sized projection screen has a face only a mother could love - it's an un�attering cross between a camel and an iguana. With its scaly trunk, pointed tail, incongruously massive back, and underdeveloped front legs, this does not appear to be a graceful creature. Yet, if you watch it nurse its young, chomp on foliage, and frolic under the canopy of a sequoia forest, the critter seems downright cute - something a kid would want for a pet.
It's been 80 million years since this animal, a Cretaceous-era creature known as the maiasaur, roamed what is today the northern United States. Now, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has brought the beast vividly back to life in a series of multimedia simulations that tell the story of its life, habitat, and evolution, as well as recount a recent excavation of its fossilized bones in Montana. The exhibit, which opened last June, employs technology in the most ambitious effort undertaken by a museum to inject life into inanimate artifacts.
"To me, this is a dream come true," gushes Hans-Dieter Sues, the paleontologist who curated the exhibit. "The animations give people an idea of what the living, breathing animal would have looked like. Without multimedia, it would be very difficult to convey the excitement."
When the team that discovered the fossils approached him last year, Sues saw an opportunity "to show people how a specimen from the ground is transformed into an object of scientific investigation and ultimately, public exhibit." Over the course of two years, museum goers will be able to view paleontologists at work extracting the fossils from rock and preparing them for mounting. Meanwhile, five interactive presentations - "thumb candy," as Tom Wujec, a creative director at the museum, affectionately calls them - take visitors into the maiasaur's life and times. At one station, animated clips illustrate the evolution of the dinosaur: users move a slider bar to view the skull of a maiasaur ancestor morph into the shapes of five of its descendants.
The pi�ce de r�sistance, however, is the exhibit's 14-by-22-foot Intelligent Wall, which projects realistic simulations of the maiasaur and its environment. Based on extensive research and 3-D models, and executed largely in Alias/Wavefront's PowerAnimator, the presentation depicts the animal in different states and activities. Visitors control the scenes using a touch panel.
Although the museum has used digital graphics before, nothing has approached the maiasaur event in scale and complexity.
Project manager Tim Moore faced a logistical nightmare in making the computers child-proof, positioning the large-screen presentation for optimum viewing, and devising acoustical tricks to prevent sound overlap between presentations.
There were accusations that the museum was playing fast and loose with science for the sake of �ash. Wujec admits that, for all the research, "no one really knows what the maiasaur looked like or how it moved. Our work is basically like Jurassic Park," he explains, "except we have to be accurate first and entertaining second." Royal Ontario Museum: +1 (416) 586 8000.
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Setting the Fossils Free
