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Eurypterid was an invertebrate that grew up to 8 feet long. It is part of the 'Bizarre Beasts' exhibit at National Geographic Museum.
Paleoartist Gary Staab created and designed the 'Bizarre Beasts, Past and Present' exhibit, now open - |
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.
A "build your own creature" interactive display based on natural selection allows kids to create their own species. They choose an environment, then features such as head, teeth, feet and tail, and the station tells them if the animal could make it.
The result is a fanciful creature, but one that might actually be able to survive in real life--and one that can teach kids real lessons.
Staab said this "Creature Feature" station was "super popular" in the exhibit's opening run this summer in Hastings, Neb., where he took it to get the bugs out before bringing it to Washington.
A brilliantly simple feature is a station that allows kids to use a sheet of paper and specially molded crayons to do take-home rubbings of fossils of prehistoric creatures, such as the dunkleosteus. It was a slow-moving, incredibly brutish 30-foot, armor-plated kind of fish called a placoderm, with huge, sharp, chomping plates instead of teeth. It lived 360 million years ago and was probably the most vicious predator of its time, greedily gobbling up other large fish, then vomiting up the huge bones.
There's also a "bone puzzle" that allows kids to put together a stegosaurus skeleton.
The exhibit, Staab said, is intended "to change your eyes, to change your mind, to make you look at things in a new way.
Staab himself never went to a museum as a child. He wasn't bitten by the museum bug until he was in college, but when it bit, it bit hard.
In 1986, he was impressed by a diorama at the Hastings Museum of Natural History.
"I suddenly realized people have to make museums," he said.
Since then he has crafted models of hundreds of creatures, ranging from an oversized flea to a life-size dinosaur.
The key to his success seems to be maintaining his own childlike sense of wonder.
"There's so much variability in all of nature," he said. "Sometimes things can surprise you."
To reach MICHAEL ZITZ:
Email: mikez@freelancestar.com
WHAT: 'Bizarre Beasts, Past and Present,' WHERE: National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall, 1145 17th St., N.W., Washington WHEN: Now through COST: Admission is free. INFO: 202/857-7588, nationalgeographic .com/museum |
