Dinosaurs

“Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries,” the new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, offers a walk-through re-creation of a 130-million-year-old Chinese forest populated with previously unseen models of beaked and feathered dinosaurs, dino-eating mammals and even flying dinosaurs such as Microraptor — a four-winged, feathered glider. Museum visitors can experiment with T. rex biomechanics using interactive animations, created in Maya and Flash and turned into QuickTime movies, running on dual-processor Power Mac G5 stations. “We’re very happy with the way this stuff runs on the Mac, particularly with regard to what we can do with QuickTime, in terms of embedding video into an interactive shell,” says Mike Cosaboom, manager of Interactive exhibits. One of the biggest visual wows at the exhibit involves a synchronized three-video-source, three-screen animated projection of an Apatosaurus morphing out from just bones into layers of muscles, nerves and skin behind a gleaming 60-foot steel Apatosaurus skeleton that stretches across the center of the exhibition. Read more about the project and watch four video clips from the dinosaur exhibit.