Smithsonian.com

The Tyrannosaurus rex family at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, featuring a juvenile, a teenager and an adult. Image by Karen Knauer and courtesy the NHM.

Slowly but surely, museums across the United States are updating their dinosaur exhibits. The state of dinosaur science is changing so rapidly that even exhibits renovated in the 1990s are at least partially outdated, and I am thrilled to see so many institutions incorporating the latest science into their new displays. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is among the institutions giving their dinosaurs a facelift, and their new dinosaur hall is set to open in July 16 of this year.

The museum recently sent out a sneak peek of what visitors to the new exhibit can expect. According to a packet about the new dinosaur hall, the displays will focus on questions like “What are dinosaurs?” “What was the world like when dinosaurs lived?” “What were dinosaurs like as living animals?” and “What happened to the dinosaurs?” The exhibit will emphasize the prehistory of California. Three hundred specimens will help flesh out the stories of dinosaur lives, including a unique Tyrannosaurus rex growth series that shows how this most famous dinosaur changed as it grew up. (The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the assembly of these skeletons last year.) These fossils will be featured in a relatively open display with lots of additional, interactive aspects to the exhibits, and it sounds wonderful. With any luck, I’ll be able to swing over to the museum myself and check it out after it opens this summer.