DINO-mite Time at Night at the Museum!

This Friday, seventeen children brave a dreary Iowa evening to come to the museum and dig for dinosaurs, at the last Night at the Museum for 2012.  In Iowa Hall, they race each other across the museum (while wearing “dinosaur feet” slippers) and wait for the others to arrive. Some of them know quite a bit about dinosaurs already – able to name the difference between a Tyrannosaurus rex, a velociraptor, a steogosaurus – others (like me) know comparatively little. 

After the races subsist and pizza and juice devoured in Bird Hall, the children begin the first dinosaur related activity – becoming miniature paleontologists. We take a moment to talk about what a paleontologist does: they dig up prehistoric animals, like fossils or woolly mammoths, out in the field, then study them in their labs.  Most of all, we talk about why a paleontologist does their job: why dig up old animals when there’s so much new to explore? Why take the time to carefully retrieve the bones from the wild, clean them off with care, run tests on them and make models for museums?

Each child gets a plate covered in sand and fossils – they have to use a plastic spoon to carefully retrieve their fossil from the sand. Some children dig right in, pounding the sand to try and find their fossil, but others, in true paleontologist form, take more time, scraping past the layers of dust to come up with a dinosaur head (albeit plastic).  Like real paleontologists, they want to know what kind of dinosaur they have – sure, the dinosaurs have been in the sand (although only for a day or two, not millions of years), but that doesn’t mean the children can’t learn from them.  Real bones found in the wild, and even their plastic counterparts, have much to tell us about an Earth that’s radically different from today. We’ll never get to see it in our lifetimes, but we can always make a good guess, which is what paleontology is about.

Later on – after trips through Bird and Mammal Hall, as per tradition – the children come back to the discovery hub to try their hand at fashioning their own dinosaurs.  The floor covered in all kinds of craft materials, from pipe cleaners to plastic jewels to paper and scissors, the children grab everything they can in a minute and then set to fashioning their own dinosaurs.  Some of them are crafty; others aim for a basic dinosaur that can “get the job done.” All of them twist their pipecleaners and add their clothespins, trying to make the best dinosaurs possible.  (Children are infinitely better at these kinds of things – my dinosaur is only a dinosaur if you tilt your head to the left and squint; my dinosaur will not be roaming the wild anytime soon.) 

The amount of children at Friday’s Night at the Museum points to our never-ending fascination with dinosaurs – and the world of the dinosaurs by proxy.  One child asks why the dinosaurs went extinct, and others name off the theories: a volcano, an asteroid, disease, the food chain bottoming out.  Yet the truth is that we’ll never actually know.  When so much of science and history are based on facts – certain chemicals do certain things when mixed together, or certain events happened at one particular time and place – the dinosaurs, and their faraway, forest world, elude us, no matter how much we uncover.  After all, we only have the bones they left behind, and the rest is guesswork: but it’s fascinating guesswork nonetheless.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian