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Dinosaurs Uncovered
From: The Natural History Museum
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 o mark 2001 as Year of the Predator at The Natural History Museum, visitors witnessed the arrival in February of one of the largest predators ever to roam the Earth,  Tyrannosaurus rex. T.rex can be found in the Museum's world famous on-line Dinosaur Gallery (www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/ lifegalleries/dinosaurs.html), the home to over 100 dinosaur specimens and three vicious Deinonychus robotic models. The new animatronic T.rex, which stands at four metres high and nearly seven metres long, can be seen in close-up detail on this site, complete with blinking eye. The on-line gallery directs users to five important dinosaur options: |
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| Deinonychus | |
The Dino Directory is a comprehensive database of 119 dinosaurs, which includes the most well described species known to humans. Dinosaurs were land archosaurs ("ruling lizards") with an upright gait, that appeared about 250 million years ago. A brief introduction ensures that users are familiar with this important background information, which includes details of other ancient reptiles often mistaken for dinosaurs, before proceeding to the Directory. Through the Dino Directory, users may select the dinosaur of their choice via a range of options:
- Time period: split into Upper Triassic, Lower Jurassic, Middle Jurassic, Upper Jurassic, Lower Cretaceous and Upper Cretaceous
- Region: for each time period you can find out which dinosaurs might have lived together
- Country: the 26 locations cover all major continents, in countries ranging from Egypt, Russia, Argentina and the US
- Body shape, based on six easily recognisable dinosaur outlines. The types are neatly defined by rolling-over the chosen shape: for example, "medium sized horned herbivores walking on four legs". Once selected, a list is given featuring name (genus), branch (clade), family and period of dinosaurs that fall within the major shape category. Close-up images (including full-body, skull and skeleton), plus key facts, can be found by selecting the desired species.
The Dinosaur Data Files provide the opportunity to discover a range of key
facts about 28 dinosaur species, including the most recent and important dinosaur discovery, Baryonyx, in 1983.  Information about each of the species--for example, definition, pronunciation, grouping, height, weight and diet--is given in each data fact sheet, which has been designed to be easily printed out or downloaded as an Excel file for personal or educational use. |
The website also features information relating to the Dinosaurs of the Gobi Desert exhibition in 1997, where 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossils from Mongolia were seen for the first time in the UK. The exhibition told the story of the intrepid 1920s researchers, who, while looking for proof that Central Asia was the cradle of human evolution, inadvertently discovered these dinosaur fossils and eggs, which fired the imagination of people around the world. |
Recreating Dinosaurs offers a discussion of the work of scientists in the US who have claimed they have managed to extract insect, plant and bacterial DNA from amber that was up to 120 million years old. A full discussion of this work and findings entitled The Search for DNA in Amber (www.fathom.com) by Andrew Ross and Jeremy Austin can be found on the Fathom website. |
Meet T.rex brings users face-to-face with the world's most advanced and life-like dinosaur model. The Museum will soon be adding video clips of their new acquisition to more fully demonstrate what a close encounter with a T.rex might have been like. |
The Natural History Museum creates all its own website material, and these pages have been developed through collaboration between the Palaeontology and the Exhibitions, Education and Information Services departments. |
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