Blue Collar Scientist

I was driving through Orlando, Florida the other day and saw a billboard advertising the Orlando Science Center, so, on a whim, I decided to go. (When you are nearly 4,000 miles from home, you might as well take advantage of these opportunities.)

On the night I went (January 20), the Center was having a big video game convention, so it was crawling with hyped-up overstimulated teenagers who were, by and large, not interested in the exhibits proper. But this didn’t bother me too much - the gaming was going on mainly in the large atrium and in some meeting rooms and hallways, and the exhibit halls were just fine - in fact, it was as though I was there on a slow night.

The Center has the usual exhibits pitched at kids that seek to demonstrate forces, material strength, elastic rebound, electricity, conversion of energy, and other physical concepts with ingenious hands-on devices. They do a nice job with that, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

They also have an excellent cabinet of partial fossils, including some very old mammal skulls, which was absolutely fascinating. I’ve never seen mammal fossils that old before.

But what really stood out was their dinosaur hall. It was absolutely outstanding.

They do not have an especially large space devoted to the topic, but they’ve made very good use of what they have. Most of the mounted skeletons are high-quality casts. They have a cast of Stan, the the Tyrannosaurus rex (BHI 3033), and it is sufficiently good to easily discern the broken ribs and fused cervical vertebra that this skeleton is famous for. It stands as a tribute to the Black Hills Institute’s work (who I presume provided the cast). It is mounted in what I understand to be a more or less proper theropod posture - the spine and tail are roughly horizontal, and although the head is elevated nobody will confuse the posture with that of the old tripod pose with the animal balanced on its tail. It is mounted with a Triceratops in way that suggests interaction.

Remarkably, they also have a cast of the Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis called “Sandy” (the original is on display at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. Sandy’s skeleton was partially preserved, making it unique in the genus, and this apparently makes Orlando Science Center’s display more up-to-date than the Wikipedia entry on this dinosaur. In any case, it was a great thrill to see a mounted cast of this very interesting dinosaur.

Other mounts include a cast of the hadrosaur Edmontosaurus annectens, a cast Xiphactinus audax (a big teleost fish, not a dinosaur, this specimen found flattened in the fossil bed and laboriously pieced back together in 3-D), a cast Platecarpus ictericus (a mosasaur, a very long, serpentine marine reptile), a cast Elasmosaurus platyurus (a plesiosaur, another long-necked marine reptile), a Clidastes propython (another mosasaur), and a cast Hesperornis gracilis (a late Cretaceous bird). I may be overlooking a few mounts, but just what is mentioned here makes the exhibit very impressive indeed.

(I am, by the way, very much in favor of the disclosed use of casts, particularly in a museum that attracts a lot of kids. Not that casts are cheap by any means - but they are at least not irreplaceable. The culture of mounting skeletons has at times resulted in exhibit curators conning the viewer by completing a partial skeleton with bones from other specimens, and sometimes even other species. I recall seeing an Allosaur once that had at least ten bones in the leg and foot that were out of place. My observation with casts is that exhibits tend to be - on average - more honest, with replacements more likely to be noted. But this is also true of recently-updated mounts of skeletons, so it may just be a “standards and practices” thing.)

Rounding out the collection is an excellent cast of the famous Oviraptor nest that contained a preserved embryo (see “A Theropod Dinosaur Embryo and the Affinities of the Flaming Cliffs Dinosaur Eggs” by Mark Norell et al, in Science, sometime in 1994). Oviraptor was discovered on a dinosaur nest by Roy Chapman Andrews in 1924, and was famously presumed to have been an eater of eggs. By 1977, someone had noticed that the jaw was awfully strong for such a purpose, and discussion ensued about what the diet of Oviraptor really was; but the 1994 paper really blew the lid off things and established that Andrews’ Oviraptor was actually caring for its eggs. The nest that is cast for the Orlando Science Center, with its embryo, established that Oviraptor embryonic development was strikingly similar to that of birds. Oviraptor is considered the most bird-like non-bird dinosaur and therefore its existence is a significant confirmation of evolutionary theory.

They’ve also got a cabinet of small specimens that includes a Pterosaurid skull (labeled Tapejara wellnhoferi, and not a cast, though I thought only one skull of the species had been found). It also included two bird skulls, one toothed (Hesperornis gracilis, again), the other toothless and slightly hook-billed (Paleospheniscus). This is not entirely surprising, since Hesperornis is Cretaceous, or 65+ mya, while Paleospheniscus is from the Miocene, 20 to 5.3 mya. As the theory of evolution predicts, the more recent bird shares more attributes with modern specimens. So right there in that cabinet were two of the “transitional fossils” that the religious extremist evolution deniers swear by the name of their alleged god don’t exist. *

They also had one of the most kick-ass posters I’ve ever seen (A Correlated History of Earth, published by Pan Terra) positioned in the cabinet to provide a context - geographic, deep timeline, and and evolutionary - for the various specimens. I’ve rarely seen a more information-dense tool and I’ve already ordered a copy for myself.

The exhibit was unashamedly evolutionary. There must be a lot of temptation to buckle under to the so-called “controversy” and soft-pedal evolution in a museum that sits in the middle of one of the most backwards states since Kansas, but the people that run the Orlando Science Center are doing the right thing. Interpretive signs discuss in some detail the evolutionary implications of the specimens on exhibit, and explain what elements of the specimen’s anatomy has led to which conclusions by the paleontologists and multi-disciplinary scientists who study these creatures. For someone who is a bit of a lay expert, or at least a lay enthusiast, there is sufficient information to put the specimens in context and think about them intelligently. (Being a real geek, I also looked up some details on a couple of the specimens on my Blackberry.)

Anyway - if you are ever in or near Orlando - go visit the Orlando Science Center. This one room is well worth the price of admission. (Which I think was fifteen bucks - this, in the city of the $120 ticket that gets you into entirely artificial corporate-built “attractions.”)

* The Blue Collar Scientist accepts cladistics and the implications of that discipline on the concept of transitional forms.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under birds, education and public outreach, evolution, religious extremism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.