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capturing kids' imaginations creature feature
'Bizarre Beasts' exhibit at National Geographic Museum in Washington will shock and awe even kids suffering from sensory overload
Date published: 9/21/2006
By MICHAEL ZITZ ASHINGTON--Today's kids are bombarded with enough strange images to jade even the brightest, most curious minds. How, Gary Staab wondered, can a museum vie with television and video games to capture their imaginations? The answer can be found in his "Bizarre Beasts, Past and Present" exhibit at the National Geographic Museum. Fortunately, Staab, a boyish Golden, Colo., illustrator and sculptor who calls himself a "paleoartist," is smart enough to know that truth really can be stranger than fiction--and more interesting. And he's humble enough to listen to the experts--his own 7- and 5-year-old sons, Max and Owen--in his quest to stimulate the minds of children. "They're my target audience, and I usually trust their opinion," he said. "I'm so close to all this stuff that it's hard for me to decide. I almost always defer to them." The creatures in "Bizarre Beasts" seem to be straight out of science fiction, but they are all real--most from prehistoric times, but some still living today. Staab's goal, he said, is to "get kids excited." His studio in Colorado designed and built models for the 2000 Disney film "Dinosaur." And, in 2002, he created a National Geographic Museum model of "SuperCroc," a 40-foot-long prehistoric reptile excavated from the Sahara Desert. "Bizarre Beasts" features authentic cast skeletons of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures; realistic, fleshed-out animal reconstructions; and models and fossils that children can touch. Staab's two favorite creatures in the exhibit seem too far-fetched to be real, but they are: l The diatryma, a predatory 9-foot "terror bird" rose after the fall of the dinosaurs to roam Wyoming 60 million years ago, feeding on the dog-sized horse ancestors of the era. l The whorl-tooth shark, a prehistoric 20-footer prowled American waters with a centered and circular 8-inch row of teeth that resembled a buzz saw. "People look at this and say, 'No way,'" Staab said. Also bound to cause young eyes to pop: a fleshed-out reconstruction of an African pterosaur, a flying dinosaur with a 15-foot wingspan and frighteningly long, sharp teeth used to pluck fish from the water. It looks like a comic-book mutant version of a pterodactyl.
Date published: 9/21/2006
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