The biggest of the big

The Morning Call: The biggest of the big. 'The World's Largest Dinosaurs' exhibit in New York City reveals secrets for living large

"The World's Largest Dinosaurs," a new exhibit at New York City's American Museum of Natural History, digs deeper than fossil pits to take visitors beyond standard dinosaur skeletons and rock-studded fossils. It teaches fascinating new facts about how these tractor-trailer-size giants lived and thrived for 140 million years.

What dieter wouldn't envy a sauropod who had to eat 1,000 pounds of food daily, just to "beef up" by 10 to 12 pounds a day? Of course, there were downsides for these eating machines. As the exhibit explains, they needed to grow new teeth as often as once a month because eating so much wore their teeth down quickly. Apparently, they also farted (excuse me!) often because they released about 13 gallons of gas per day while processing their food.

Mamenchisaurus, a massive 18-year-old female dinosaur at the heart of the exhibit, stands 11 feet tall and 60 feet long and doesn't blush at all about such revealing facts.

Fleshed out to her life-sized full figure, she lights up to expose even more information about herself and other members of her plant-eating sauropod clan that also included the Apatosaurus (formerly known as the Brontosaurus). Although the average weight of the Mamenchisaurus was 12 tons, the biggest sauropod of all, the Argentinosaurus, tipped the scales at 90 tons. You'd have to pile 15 modern-day elephants on a scale to make his weight!

People are always fascinated by the world's large things, from the tallest buildings to the largest ball of twine, says museum president Ellen Futter. "These sauropods were the most super-sized creatures of all time and their size raises all kinds of questions about how and why they were so big and what they needed to live."

She adds, "We've moved beyond bones to biology. Scientists are learning more and more about what made these animals tick."

Their findings went into the creation of the Mamenchisaurus as well as into interactive parts of the exhibition, including hands-on and computer activities for kids and a re-creation of a dig site complete with fossils.

As you sit on one of the benches along the Mamenichisaurus' left side, take a minute to gaze from the tip of her face to the end of her tail. An amazing old girl, she lived 160 million years ago, in what is now China. She is depicted with a mouthful of plants, as she grazes her way to her required daily allowance of greenery.

Listen and you'll hear her breathing and her beating heart. Thanks to a video projection system, you'll see her sides move and learn more about her super-efficient respiratory system, with storage sacs that filled with fresh air and gave her twice the fresh air for every breath she took.

Then, check out the projections of her tummy. It functioned like a compost heap, with sausage-like projections that contained the fermenting plants she ate. Turning the plants into energy could take as long as two weeks.

Walk along the Mamenchisaurus' other side and you'll see the rough texture of her skin. Although the old girl lacks the Disney-like allure she'd get from singing, dancing, walking or talking, she still makes a big impression worthy of the footprints her family once cast upon the earth.

Beyond the life-size model there's a wealth of new information and audiovisuals that will increase your understanding of these giants. A multidisciplinary approach was used to develop the intriguing new information about the sauropods. Paleontologists were joined by biologists, botanists, animal nutritionists and engineers who used their expertise to draw conclusions about the dinosaurs' lives. New technology, including CT scans, has helped reveal even more, like the two gyroscope-style structures lodged inside a sauropod's skull that were its balance organs and embryos in dinosaur eggs.

"Finding out what kept the dinosaurs alive, how much they ate, how they grew and how they got blood from their heart to their brains at the end of such long necks were unapproachable questions a few years ago. Now we can shed light on their lives," said Michael Novacek, senior vice president and curator of the Division of Paleontology at the museum.

The exhibition begins by exploring how size affects just about everything an animal does, from eating and breathing to moving and reproducing, as well as how the sauropods got bigger and bigger over the 140 million years they roamed the earth. It explains that predators don't usually attack the largest animals of a group. So natural selection favored bigger animals and over time, the descendents of the larger animals kept getting bigger and bigger.

Another section explores teeth and eating, and explains how these huge plant-eaters tore off the tips of branches or stripped the leaves from them with rake-like teeth and swallowed them whole. One sign says, "Because they had to get as much down their gullets as possible, taking the time to chew would have been a fatal error."

The exhibit has 11 areas, including Head, Neck and Movement; Heart and Circulation; Lungs and Breathing; Stomach and Digestion; Eggs and Reproduction; How massive were sauropods?; What did sauropods look like?; How did sauropods behave? and How do paleontologists excavate fossils? They'll give you a much broader picture of all aspects of a dinosaur's life than you'd get by simply exploring the museum's other dinosaur-related halls of skeletons and fossils.

As you go, you'll discover features dinosaurs have in common with today's creatures, from the breathing system and egg-laying characteristics of birds to the light-but-long necks of giraffes and the digestive system of Galapagos turtles.

You'll gain new insights. Their big-enough brains that weighed in at less than half a pound (our brains weigh 48 ounces) gave them enough smarts to find food, herd their young and be the dominant plant eaters on earth for 140 million years. However, as an exhibit sign says, "That's not to say they were deep thinkers!"

These giants probably moved at speeds from 1 to 5 miles per hour.

What would it have been like to touch one? Their skin was dry and warm, and their scales were bumpy and knobby. Because they had no sweat glands, they didn't perspire.

You can touch dino teeth and skulls, calculate a dinosaur's size from its femur bone and see how much effort it took for a dinosaur's heart to circulate blood throughout its body. Just be sure you've eaten your Wheaties before you try to pump the hand-pump set to the correct pressure.

You'll encounter an eye-popping, bowl of greens that's taller than a person and as large as a whole group of people standing inside a large elevator. The contents of these mega-eaters' favorite salad? Botanists say it included ginkgo, ferns and conifers and the tough-but-nutritious horsetail plant.

After examining a range of eggs laid by living and extinct species, you'll realize dino eggs weren't as huge as you'd expect, with the largest ones weighing in at around 9 pounds. You can see and touch fossil eggs and examine eggshells' pores with a magnifier. At the end, kids can don goggles and use brushes and chisels to find fossils in a re-created dinosaur dig.

Dr. Steven Perry, a zoology professor at the University of Bonn in Germany, was one of the researchers involved in determining how these huge creatures breathed. On hand on press preview day, he lamented, "I'd love to be a kid now. In my youth, all we could do was look at the fossilized bones and skeletons and say, 'Wow.' Now, however, kids can ask questions that I asked and get answers."