Buffalo, NY: Science museum goes prehistoric, revealing ‘BIG’ new residents

From Buffalo News.com: Science museum goes prehistoric, revealing ‘BIG’ new residents
For weeks, the Buffalo Science Museum tantalized its members and fans with clues about an exciting surprise to be revealed Thanksgiving weekend.

“Something BIG is coming,” the museum’s website teased, urging people to send in guesses as to what that big something was through Facebook and Twitter.

At least 600 people were waiting Saturday morning outside the East Side museum’s door to find out.

They were not disappointed.

The museum unveiled two new “residents,” as museum president Mark Mortenson likes to call them: towering life-size casts of a 12-foot-tall mastodon and a 26- foot-long Albertosaurus.

“I love dinosaurs!” declared Arianna Pocobello, 10, of North Tonawanda, as she gazed up at the bones of the Albertosaurus, a relative of the Tyrannosaurus that walked the planet 70 million years ago.

Arianna, who was accompanied by her grandmother Suzanne Pocobello, acknowledged she wasn’t too surprised by the museum’s secret.

“We kind of figured it out,” the grandmother said.

But they, and seemingly everyone else, seemed thrilled to be a part of the welcoming celebration.

Sam Leaderstorf, 7, of the Town of Tonawanda, came with his little brother Max, 6, and friend Bryan Crispin, 7. Bryan had never visited the museum before.

“I didn’t really know what would be here,” he said.

The boys enjoyed “looking at bones,” Sam said, and were excited by all the paleontological activities that were available Saturday, including making fossils out of play-dough.

The dinosaur and the ancient mammal will be permanently displayed in Hamlin Hall on the second floor of the Buffalo Science Museum.

They will be the first of a series of new exhibits planned for the museum, said Mortenson, president and CEO of the museum.

“This is the trigger of a major transformation at the Buffalo Science Museum,” he said.

Over the next four to five years, he said, the museum plans to open a new exhibit area. The next to open will be a hands-on health sciences studio in March, and then an earth sciences studio in October.

“We’re going to essentially transform the entire museum,” he said.

The former dinosaur exhibit at the museum will be dismantled, but the pieces from the collection will be used in other areas, Mortenson said.

The giant casts of bones were funded in part by a donation from Lise Buyer, a Buffalo native who runs an IPO advisory firm in Silicon Valley. Her late father, Bob Buyer, was a reporter at The Buffalo News and she attended Nichols School, where she now serves as a trustee.

Buyer named the mastodon Seymour after a beloved childhood pet dog.

But the Albertosaurus so far is unnamed, and the museum is sponsoring a naming contest. Name suggestions can be submitted through the museum’s Facebook page or through forms available at the museum. The names must be submitted by Dec. 19. Buyer will choose the top 10 names, and the community will vote on the winner, which will be announced Jan. 19.