You Can Pet Dinosaurs

This is the front entrance of the original 1913 building of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Leslie's job is managing one of the world's largest worm libraries in the basement of this building which is now being refurbished to its former glory. This entrance looks out on the rose garden at Exposition Park.


Last Saturday, in the nearly impenetrable bowels of another part of the museum, she gave a public talk on the subject of marine garbage. Knowing attendance might be slim she accepted my offer to attend. Great talk. She's giving another one on April 19th.

Afterwards we were standing in the museum's rotunda - a noisy impressive domed stone-walled space filled with little screaming children and skeletons of the iconic T-Rex/Triceratops prize fight. There's a sculpture of a similar scene outside the museum.


At one point, standing there in the tumult, I turned around to see what appeared to be an actual breathing, moving dinosaur coming straight for me. And then another one. I did the obvious thing - I whipped the point-and-shoot out of my pocket, pointed it and shot some video.

I've cobbled the video bits into this 2 minute, 16 second piece. There's no music, so if you hate my compositions watch without fear.




Leslie couldn't tell me too much about these critters. She did know that they came from Australia at great expense. (Here's a YouTube television interview about the capture of a dryosaur in New Zealand.)

I was very impressed with them. I can't find anything on the NHMLAC website about the dinos but it does have this section about Leslie's marine worm collection.

Click the pictures, they get bigger. Hey.

UPDATE: Read about the origin of these creatures HERE!!! (I've corrected this post based on information there. Thanks for this to Steve Howarth who left a comment.)

Dino Tags: Dinosaurs. . . NHMLAC. . . Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. . . puppets. . . T-rex