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Hear, See,
and Touch a Hollow-crested
Duck-billed Dinosaur at Interior Museum-
A new exhibition at the U.S. Department
of the Interior  Museum
spotlights an eccentric-looking herbivore named Parasaurolophus
that roamed the U.S. Southwest 70 to 80 million years ago.
Visitors to the Interior Museum exhibition
are invited to hear simulations of the sounds the dinosaur made
through its long hollow crest, see a plaster cast of its skull,
and touch its fossilized thigh bone. Entitled Parasaurolophus:
a Dinosaur Discovery on Interior's Public Lands, the exhibition
is on loan to the Interior Museum from the New Mexico Museum of
Natural History and Science. It opens August 10 and continues
indefinitely. 
Paleontologists discovered the skull
and thigh bone of this 3-ton giant in 1995 on Bureau of Land Management
public lands in northwestern New Mexico. The extraordinary excavation
of hadrosaur fossils occurred in the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. There,
Thomas Williamson, of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History
and Science, and Robert Sullivan, of The State Museum of Pennsylvania,
unearthed the second most complete skull of a Parasaurolophus,
a dinosaur that grew to be 33 feet long and 16 feet tall. Scientists
created computer generated sounds with a three-dimensional model
produced from scans of the skull. Whether this dinosaur had vocal
chords remains a mystery, so the presentation includes sounds
generated with and without vocal chords.
Artifacts from Interior Museum collections
augment the exciting story of fossil finds on Department of the
Interior public lands. A plaster cast of Allosaurus, a  dinosaur
of the Jurassic period and nearly twice Parasaurolophus' age,
peers out over the fossilized remains of the younger herbivore.
Geologists discovered the skull at Utah's Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur
Quarry overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The exhibition also features an oil painting by American  artist
Charles Knight (1874-1953) of Brontotherium, extinct relatives
of the rhinoceros who roamed the plains of South Dakota and Nebraska
in the Eocene era 50 million years ago. Knight's well-researched
and skillful depictions of extinct animals at New York's American
Museum of Natural History won him acclaim and set a standard for
painters of scientific subjects.
The Interior Museum is open to the
public Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (except
for federal holidays) and the third Saturday of each month from
1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Admission is free. Adult visitors must
present a form of photo identification (such as a driver's license,
student ID, or employment card) when entering the Main Interior
Building, which is at 1849 C Street, N.W., in Washington, D.C.
Wheelchair access is available at the 18th and E Streets entrance.
For information, call 202-208-4743 or visit the museum's website
at http://www.doi.gov/museum. For photographic prints, please
contact Anne James, Assistant Curator, The Interior Museum, 202-
208-4659.
More
images of the display.
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