L.A. natural history museum's dinosaurs steal the show, and without tan lines
Is there anything more eyeball-catching than topless supermodels sunbathing on pleasure craft? Well, yes -- when that something is a baby Tyrannosaurus rex freely roaming the halls of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Without any ballyhoo, the museum launched a new attraction in June called Dinosaur Encounters, in which actor-puppeteers don lifelike T. rex or triceratops suits and spend 20 minutes demonstrating how scientists believe baby dinos behaved. Usually they work with interpreter-handlers, but sometimes they just roam free and meet their public. Which is how a museum-goer's video of a grunting, bemused, 7-foot-tall and 14-foot-long T. rex inspecting babes-in-arms and other humans at close range came to be posted on MySpacetv on Thursday. “Real Live Dinosaur” shot to No. 1 on MySpace's daily video chart, attracting more than 215,000 viewers by early evening -- far outstripping "Cindy and Heidi Bare It All." That clip from TMZ featured stills of Crawford and Klum yachting au naturel, their modesty preserved by strategically placed black bars.
More than 4,100 comments were posted about the dinosaur video, some speculating on whether it was animatronic, computer-generated, inhabited by an inner human or, from some apparent true believers in "Jurassic Park," really . . . alive. This prompted the museum to rush its own promotional page for Dinosaur Encounters onto MySpace by day's end. The little T. rex's Internet splash "shows that this program really gets into people's heads," said Julia Rivera, the museum's marketing director. The suit-puppets, each weighing more than 70 pounds, were fashioned by Erth, an Australian special-effects company; they're billed as the first of their kind at a North American museum. Dinosaur Encounters take place three times daily, Wednesdays through Sundays, at the museum in Exposition Park.
mike.boehm@latimes.com
