NY: Dino dreams spark kids' imaginations

From RecordOnline, Wayne's World Blog: Wayne's World: Dino dreams spark kids' imaginations

By Wayne Hall
Published: 2:00 AM - 11/27/11

Here's a 200-million-year-old-user's-guide warning for overexposure to dinosaur Christmas presents.

Too much dino dreaming can turn you into a paleontologist – the people who study dinosaurs.

“That's what happened to me,” says Richard Kissel, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Ithaca-based Museum of the Earth.

He's not fooling.

Listen to Brianna Cockshuttle, 10, of Sullivan County:

“I want to be a paleontologist,” says this 4-H Club kid whose rabbits, chickens, turkeys and hermit crab got her animal love stoked. “The first time I watched a movie about this I thought this is awesome and I came to love it.”

And so could anyone, now that there's even more reason to get excited about dinosaurs.

Turns out they're as local around here as the neighborhood diner.

“There's no reason to believe they weren't here,” says Kissel.

Which isn't something a lot of people know.

Dinosaurs so big they could peer into your second-story bedroom shook the ground right here in Orange and Ulster counties and maybe even Sullivan.

We're talking a big bruiser, something like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, located just down the road in Pennsylvania. And maybe in our region, too.

“We had our fair share of top predators,” says Kissel.

“No reason they wouldn't have been there,” says Robert Ross, a vertebrate paleontologist with the Museum of the Earth.

And the New York State Museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology, Robert S. Feranec, points out there's always something new about dinosaurs.

Right next door in Rockland County, footprints were found of a meat-eating small dinosaur hunting in packs – called the wolves of their day.

Gigantic bones of a huge duck-billed plant-eating dinosaur with 2,000 teeth were found in the gray slime of a marl pit in nearby New Jersey.

And found along the Hudson and Connecticut rivers were primitive crocodilian teeth, bones of meat-eating toothed flying reptiles, and intriguing bits and pieces still under study.

In fact, this ancient world is endlessly fascinating – new stuff's always getting found like a 230-million-year-old petit dinosaur found in Argentina.

So it's not a surprise that kids love dinosaurs because they're “so cool, so unusual and different,” says Balmville Elementary School third-grade teacher Kris Campbell-Defoe, whose student, Stephen Justino, 8, just chose a new dinosaur favorite – one that flew – over his old choice – one that walked. “I just love Jurassic Park,' Stephen says .

So popular are these reptilians that the Museum of the Hudson Highlands' “dino pit,” where the great beasts' feet are measured, comes alive in the imagination, says museum educator Carl Heitmuller. Even for him. If he was a dinosaur, Heitmuller says, he'd be one of the plant-eaters “with a club on its tail and armor on its body” to fend off the carnivores like T-Rex.

In other words, dinosaurs tell us about life before we existed and ask us to use our imaginations. Amazing.
Check out dinosaurs

- You can see the world of dinosaurs at the New York State Museum's Ancient Life exhibit at 222 Madison Ave., Albany, 518 474-5877;

- The Museum of the Earth, 1259 Trumansburg Road, Ithaca, 607-273-6623;

- The American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West, New York, 212-769-5100.