TV viewers seem addicted to the popular forensic dramas "CSI: Miami," "CSI: NY" and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." But those shows are nothing like the new procedural that is unfolding for visitors to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where the case dates back 66 million years.
Call this show "CSI: Carter County," after the Montana badlands where the "victim" was discovered -- a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex called Thomas, stumbled upon by teacher and amateur fossil enthusiast Robert Curry, who named it after his brother, a fellow fossil fan.
For the next 18 months, visitors will be able to watch the experts at work trying to solve the mysteries of the dinosaur's life and death in the museum's new Thomas the T. rex Lab, a "paleo-odyssey."
Since 2003, a team of researchers led by Luis Chiappe, director of the museum's Dinosaur Institute, has been excavating the government-owned site in Montana and bringing back chunks of earth containing the bones of Thomas, who, with 70% of his skeleton unearthed, ranks among the most complete T. rexes in the world. The most complete -- 90% -- is Sue, housed at Chicago's Field Museum.
At the Natural History Museum, the team will go through the complex and painstaking task of readying the fossilized bones for assembly and mounting as centerpiece in the renovated dinosaur galleries, scheduled to reopen in 2011. The renovation is part of an ongoing $84-million restoration of the historic 1913 museum building, which will begin reopening its galleries in 2010.
In the past, Chiappe says, dinosaur fans were content to be impressed by "superlatives," such as age or size. Thomas, for example, would have measured about 30 feet long and 10 feet high at the hip (Sue is about 42 feet long) and would have weighed about 8,000 pounds. But now, in part because of the "CSI" phenomenon, Chiappe says, "people care more about the process -- how do you know that? Of course, a big dinosaur is going to sell, but the interest has shifted."
"This is a crime scene, and it's a 66-million-year-old crime scene," Chiappe added, "and you have your forensic team going into the field and figuring out what happened."
It was the growing public interest in such matters that led the museum to decide to put the process on view. However, Chiappe says, visitors should expect not a dramatization of the process but the chance to peek inside a working lab. "This is a lab within an exhibit. We didn't want the lab itself to be an exhibit," he says. "This is the real thing."
