Dinosaurs

When the new dinosaur exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opens in July, the most striking and transformative change will reflect a famous command from the Book of Genesis: "Let there be light. " No, Luis Chiappe, the museum's top dinosaur scientist, and his colleagues at the Exposition Park museum's Dinosaur Institute have not adopted biblical creationists' belief that the creatures they study lived and died out no more than 6,000 years ago. Chiappe is quite certain that Dinosaur Hall's denizens range in age from 65 million to 220 million years old. But museum leaders have decided that, after decades of showing eons-old bones in halls that were dim and dimmer, illuminating the story of the dinosaurs would be better accomplished by shedding a lot more light on the subject.

Tyrannosaurus rex may have had a surprising predator to fear: Tyrannosaurus rex. Paleontologists from the United States and Canada discovered T. rex bones with T. rex tooth markings on them, according to a study published online Friday in the journal PLoS One. Nicholas Longrich, the Yale University paleontologist who led the study, had been picking through dinosaur bone collections in museums, looking for signs of bites by small, scavenging mammals....

Walking With Dinosaurs Where: Staples Center, 1111 S. Figueroa St., L.A. When: 7 p.m. Fri.; 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sat.; 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Sun. Price: $39 to 79, Staples Center box office or Ticketmaster, (213) 480 3232, http://www.ticketmaster.com Info: http://www.dinosaurlive.com

Lead puppeteer Kara Klein is "dino-checking" her ankylosaurus. From a podium at the rear of the Honda Center in Anaheim, she is getting her 12-foot-tall, 34-foot-long dinosaur to move its head, tail and even gently nudge one of the technicians on the floor all by manipulating a small metal claw contraption dubbed the "voodoo rig. " "We take him through every axis of motion to make sure he is working correctly," she says. It takes two puppeteers and one driver for each of the 10 roaring and snarling creatures to make their way through the arena, while five smaller dinosaurs including a baby T. rex are operated by performers inside the suits.

FAMILY Walking With Dinosaurs The award-winning BBC TV series comes to life in this scaly theatrical event. Fifteen life-size animatronic dinosaurs, including the terror of the ancient terrain, Tyrannosaurus rex , fight for survival and supremacy in a spectacle that melds science and entertainment. Honda Center, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim. 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. and 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 5 p.m. Sunday. (714) 704-2500. http://www.dinosaurlive.

I often lament have left Los Angeles, my hometown, to live in San Francisco, especially now that I have a son. After Kai was born, we found ourselves making the trek up and down Interstate 5 at least once a month. On our third not-so-pleasant jaunt past the sea of cows, Kai began screaming and would not stop. Yearning for somewhere fabulous to stop so we could cuddle him without the stench of manure and diesel, we vowed to start taking the nice way. Three years later (after chalking up more than 100,000 miles)

Modern-day lizards, snakes, frogs and mammals — including us — may owe their existence to a mass extinction of ancient fish 360 million years ago that left the oceans relatively barren, providing room for marginal species that were our ancestors to thrive and diversify, paleontologists said Monday. The report, by University of Chicago researchers, focused on events at the end of what is commonly called the Age of Fishes, which lasted from 416 million years ago to 359 million years ago. That age was followed by a 15-million-year period of relative silence in the fossil record.

The stretch of Exposition Boulevard around the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has been a busy construction site, with the museum's renovation taking place alongside work on the Metro's new Expo Line. The first phase of the renovation will be unveiled in July with the opening of the rotunda of the 1913 building and the adjoining hall housing the "Age of Mammals" exhibition. But the museum has even more plans for its campus. On Thursday, the museum will announce that a 3.5-acre, $30-million park is in the works on the south side of the street, part of the major makeover the museum is undergoing inside and out as it heads toward its centennial in 2013.

It's official: The extinction of the dinosaurs and a host of other species 65.5 million years ago was caused by a massive asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, creating worldwide havoc, an international team of researchers said Thursday. The 7.5-mile-wide asteroid was traveling at a speed about 10 times that of a rifle bullet when it hit, releasing a billion times more energy than the Hiroshima atom bomb. The impact blew dirt and rock around the world, set massive wildfires, knocked down forests worldwide, triggered massive tsunamis and earthquakes of magnitude 11 or larger and even caused parts of the continent to slip into the ocean.

Scientists have made a rare find: four skulls of a new species of giant plant-eating dinosaur, one of them completely intact. Skulls of plant-eating dinosaurs were so light and fragile that they have rarely been preserved to be discovered by paleontologists. Reaction to the find, made in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah, was "probably not printable in a newspaper," said Dan Chure, a paleontologist with the monument. "Everyone was really dumbfounded," Chure said.