The World's Largest Dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History
As the special exhibitions at the Museum of Natural History become more and more extravagant, showcasing myths, polar expeditions, and frogs, it’s a relief to see them going back to those which made them famous—impressively enormous extinct lizards.
In the rotunda, in the halls, the highlight of every poster and every logo, dinosaurs line the halls at AMNH. It’s impossible to focus on any flashy link, so the museum went classic—big. And they made the right choice. The exhibit is well thought out and beautifully organized.
At The World's Largest Dinosaurs, a new exhibit at the Museum, size is all that matters. The question here is how did these animals eat, survive, and function day-to-day without perishing beneath their own weight or restrictions, likely crushing most of the surrounding foliage as they fell? The exhibit goes into this in depth.
Diet, weight, length, reproduction, respiration, and circulation are discussed at length along the informative notice boards that line the walls, and all questions that could be asked are answered. At some points, the subject veers wildly from dinosaurs and changes simply to size, putting water buffalo, crocodiles, giraffes, tapirs, and even an enormous butterfly up for view. And somehow this makes sense, if only because the elaborate display is planned so thoughtfully. At the very least, it’s simple. That’s why, for the viewer who would almost certainly be flattened by the extent of the information the museum is able to deliver, it’s the safest, and accordingly, impossible to dislike.
Even as you enter, the showcase begins its flamboyant display with a bang. A long sauropod’s neck cranes in through the wall, gaping at newcomers confusedly as if wondering why this unknown species has intruded upon its privacy. Continuing to a life-size human skeleton beside a titanic dinosaur’s leg (which almost presses against the ceiling) and a parade of currently living creatures so enormous they would give a prize-fighter pause, but never one of the World’s Largest Dinosaurs, which becomes more evident upon entry to the main arena of the exhibit.
Only the fine hand of a talented curator can combine something seemingly complex and elementary at once, and that’s just what The World’s Largest Dinosaurs does. The exhibition either pictorially or literally represents every fact, like the amount of greens eaten shown in a 5 x 5 tank filled to the brim with ferns and greenery. Both children and adults will feel perfectly comfortable and unembarrassed to be at the museum’s latest special exhibition because, they will feel at home absorbing any fact showing their own history, or, in this case, that of a wildly different species that lived so long before our own. Children can become accustomed to the facts through games, or touch, our fossil-digging (all three offered by Dinosaurs), and adults through the relevant literature, but both will inescapably come to the same conclusion. The world we live in is strange, and, in it, some things appear impossible to keep alive by any odd circumstances, but somehow remain. And years later, when we find their remains, it is easy to marvel at their stamina and endurance techniques, but easier still to marvel at the institution who so thoughtfully presents them for the good of the public. Amazement at history is, in itself, an amazing thing.
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