Dinosaurs in Their Natural Habitat

Pittsburgh, Nov. 7, 2007 -- Come with us on a trip back through time.

It is 150 million years ago -- a steamy Jurassic afternoon in a part of the world that will eventually come to be known as Utah.

A meat-eating allosaurus is looking for food, and spies a baby apatosaurus, cowering beneath its mother.

"So he wants to come in and knock off the baby," said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist helping to set the scene for us. "Naturally, the mother isn't too excited about that, so she's swinging her tail at the allosaurus, hoping to knock him off his feet."

Lamanna is a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which has one of the largest collections of dinosaur fossils in the world. He and his colleagues have now spent three years and $36 million rethinking their entire dinosaur hall.

The problem is that even though the last dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, scientists' understanding of them has been racing along, changing with each new find.

Our image of dinosaurs is mostly what one finds in old sci-fi films -- big, lumbering creatures, dragging their tails on the ground. In recent years, scientists have decided they were probably much more energetic and agile -- and the way most fossils were displayed was wrong.

"These things are tens of millions of years old. Don't we have this down yet?" we asked.

"Unfortunately, they don't come with instruction manuals," said Lamanna, smiling.