Kaylee Mellor, 6, studied a cast of a Tyrannosaurus skull. "They're cool," she said of dinosaurs. "They're big."
She got that right. Her brother, Luke, 2, could have fit inside the T. rex head bone.
The Coalville kids were visiting the Utah Museum of Natural History last week with their father, Karl Mellor, touring the new exhibit, "Dinosaur Tales: The Science Behind the Stories."
Mellor remarked that he first went to the museum, located on the campus of the University of Utah, as a kindergartner. Now Kaylee is in kindergarten.
"Thirty years later, we've showed up. Passing the torch," he said.
Mellor added that the exhibit is great, "and my kids really like dinosaurs."
There's a lot to like about "Dinosaur Tales," which will be open through Sept. 14. The displays tell what dinosaurs were like; how scientists discover, excavate and prepare their fossilized bones; and give a taste of the research conducted at the museum into the nature of dinosaurs.
Besides many exhibits focusing on Utah discoveries, the display also shows off a big dinosaur skull that Scott Sampson — the famous excavator who is curator of paleontology at the museum — found in Madagascar.
"What we'll try to do is give you a sample of the field, the lab and then the exhibit," Sampson said of the new displays.
Workers have been putting up the exhibits for about six months. Most of the bones have never been shown before.
One new discovery is like a Chasmosaurus, a herbivore shaped something like a huge rhinoceros with a frilled plate extending behind its skull.
"We now have at least half of the skeleton of this animal," Sampson said. "As far as we can tell, it's something new. It's from Utah. It's on the order of 75 million years old."
Mounted beside the T. rex cast are fossil bones of a tyrannosaurus that the museum excavated near Joe's Valley, Emery County, about three years ago.
"It's the first rex found in Utah," Sampson said. "The point of this exhibit is T. rex did live in Utah."
Another exhibit shows a long line of allosaurus femurs, from the light delicate arm bones of a young animal to the most massive bones of big adults, with every possible size between.
This is possible because the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, on the edge of the San Rafael Swell, has the remains of more of these fierce meat-eaters than any other known location.
The museum stores about 10,000 bones from Cleveland-Lloyd, the vast majority of them the remains of allosaurs. They date to the late Jurassic era, 150 million years ago.
Because the selection is so complete, representing animals of many stages of life, graduate student Mark Loewen could assemble a display showing how the bones developed and changed in proportion as the allosaurus grew.
Graduate student Bucky Gates may have solved the riddle of why so many of these large meat-eaters were found at Cleveland-Lloyd, while almost none of their prey were. Ordinarily, prey vastly outnumber predators.
"For his master's thesis . . . he's considered every possible reasonable hypothesis as to how all these bones got in the same place," Sampson said.
Gates' conclusion: drought. Herds of allosaurs would gather around a water hole as water became scarce.
Perhaps they hogged the remaining water, and herbivores did not dare to venture near.
When the hole dried up, said Sampson, the allosaurs "died in great numbers."
What was bad luck for dinosaurs was a stroke of fortune for the Mellors and anyone else who loves dinosaurs: allosaurus bones from Cleveland-Lloyd are part of a wonderful new suite of museum displays.
E-MAIL: bau@desnews.com