Museum officials are billing it as a mammoth event - and not just because several hundred thousand people will attend.
The newest exhibit at the Utah Museum of Natural History on the University of Utah campus is mammoth in the most literal sense possible. It features woolly mammoths, as they were 12,000 years ago during Utah's Ice Age.There are three woolly mammoths in the dinamation display. And a saber-toothed tiger, a "ladle-tail" glyptodont, two giant sloths and a rhinolike eobasileus (which is actually pre-Ice Age, having disappeared 60 million years ago, but is scary nonetheless).
As the word "dinamation" implies, these creatures breathe and move and bellow. They are driven by pneumatic pumps and the artistic vision of some California manufacturers who took Disneyland concepts, refined them and began producing dinosaurs for display in Japan and the United States.
Utahns saw the dinosaur display at the Museum of Natural History in 1988.
After the dinosaurs, the company developed the Ice Age creatures, which will be displayed at the museum through September 23.
The manufacturing company, Dinamation International, is now at work on dinosaurs of the deep. Museum of Natural History Director Donald Hague hopes to be able to bring the sea monster display to Utah someday, too.
The Utah museum is the first museum in the country to display the Ice Age replicas. Hague says that even after the models move on at the end of September, the museum will keep its Ice Age Discovery Room open.
Part of his reason for bringing this exhibit and for setting up an Ice Age Discovery Room is that the museum has contracted with the U.S. Forest Service to cast and erect the skeleton of the Huntington mammoth, which was discovered in Utah in 1988.
Utahns will continue to be interested in and proud of our own mammoth, Hague believes. "Our Ice Age Discovery Room will go on for at least another year after the dinamation display leaves," he promises.
The Huntington mammoth was discovered during reconstruction of the Huntington Reservoir in the Manti-LaSal National Forest. The skeleton is one of the most complete and well-preserved specimens of a Columbian mammoth ever discovered.
It is also significant because it is one of the oldest mammoths ever found, because it was found with human artifacts and because it was found with a rich cache of other fossils, which will help scientists reconstruct the flora and fauna of the period.
Tickets for the Ice Age Dinamation display will be handled a bit differently than they were for the dinosaur dinamation display, Hague explains. Tickets will be sold at the door of the museum on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Prices are $3.50 for adults; $2 for children 3-12.
The museum will be open Mondays from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Tuesdays through Saturdays until 5:30 p.m.; and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.
For more information, call 581-4303.