
DATE: Tuesday, June 24, 1997                TAG: 9706240538

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ERIKA REIF, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  104 lines

DINOSAURS ARE A BIG ATTRACTION

FORGET ABOUT forgetting about dinosaurs.

The ancient reptiles rule the world of pop culture, from ``Barney'' to ``The Lost World.'' They can get kids excited about science like little else can.

Taking advantage of that interest, the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News put $230,000 into what has become an important fund-raiser, the museum's annual dinosaur exhibit. This year's 17 animated creatures are mostly life-size. Featured is a 2 1/2-story-high Tyrannosaurus Rex.

``Dinosaur World'' has been drawing more than 700 visitors a day since it opened Memorial Day weekend, said museum spokeswoman Andrea Moran. By midsummer, Moran expects average attendance to surpass 1,000 visitors per day, as it did last year.

That exhibit, ``Dinosaur Jungle,'' attracted nearly 105,000 people from June through September, she said.

About 40 percent of the visitors are from outside Hampton Roads. Like locals, they are guided to the museum by blue-and-orange ``Dinosaurs'' markers scattered like road signs around Newport News.

Museum volunteer Larry Roe, who works two nights a week, notices that ``families come back and back and back,'' he said.

That the dinosaur theme has endured every summer since 1989 surprises even Mark Shanks, the museum's exhibit curator, who said, ``Every time you think the thing has had it . . . ''

He recalled a planning session last fall when museum staff brainstormed for a fresh angle for this year. Someone mentioned the scheduled spring release of the movie ``The Lost World: Jurassic Park,'' and this year's dinosaur theme emerged.

Shanks originated the exhibit's time-tunnel motif. From that idea grew an exhibit that begins before a visitor even steps through the entryway: Fog shoots outward, and buzzing and chirping jungle sounds invade the parking lot.

Nighttime intensifies the effect. On a recent evening, a boy ran ahead of his family to the tomblike opening, then hurried back to them laughing and screaming, ``Save me, save me!''

Shanks acknowledged, ``I see kids that are scared to go through the front door.''

Once inside, after encountering mist, fog and disorienting strobe lights, visitors emerge from an alley to see a mother Apatosaurus and two babies grazing near a bubbling spring. All prehistoric domesticity and tranquillity.

The ``family scenes'' put younger children at ease, Shanks said.

But the mood soon changes. A weedy, dirt path winds like a dark maze through the 30,000-square foot exhibit. The display is open to the sky, obscured partly by a canopy of vines and netting. Growls and screams pull visitors onward.

``What we create is like a whole atmosphere, a whole story, a whole feeling about something,'' Shanks said.

Broken wooden rails and hand-painted warning signs separate the trail from eight exhibits. Visitors often step from a display to its interpretive sign, then back to the rail to simply stare.

``Adults and kids alike just stand there with their mouths open,'' Shanks said.

One night, Lola Rhea of Hampton left the ``T-Rex'' exhibit on the heels of her grown daughter, clutching her arms and shuddering.

``I don't see how in the world they make things like that,'' she said of the 42-foot-tall beast. ``Each time it opens its mouth, it looks just like that one in the movie, doesn't it?''

Not quite. Shanks pointed out, ``Nobody does them as fluid and smooth as Steven Spielberg does in a computer animation.''

The company that provides the latex-skinned, metal-framed dinosaurs, Dinamation International Corp. of Irvine, Calif., shoots for educational results - turning kids on to science.

It's true that the company's inventory of 700 creatures, from whales to woolly mammoths are ``limited in movement,'' said the company's director of marketing, Christine Hindley.

Realism is sought more through anatomical correctness, achieved under the guidance of paleontologists. Air compressors and pistons create about 12 movements per dinosaur, and computers synchronize roars with the opening of each dinosaur's mouth.

Dinamation has been leasing animated figures to museums, zoos and shopping malls since 1982 and is under a revenue-sharing contract with the Living Museum. The company delivers the dinosaurs, sets them up and repairs travel injuries, then leaves it to museum staff to transform them into an exhibit. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

TAMARA VONINSKI/The Virginian-Pilot

The Dinosaur World Exhibit at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport

News features this animated Apatosaurus.

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WANT TO GO?

What: ``Dinosaur World'' exhibit

Where: Virginia Living Museum, 524 J. Clyde Morris Blvd., Newport

News

When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday and 9 a.m. to 9

p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Exhibit runs through Sept. 1

Admission: $5 adults, $4 children ages 3 to 12, free for ages 2