April 11, 2002

Pittsburgh to Become Home to World's Premier Dinosaur exhibition
Carnegie Museum of Natural History set to expand its Dinosaur Hall, becoming the first museum in the world to showcase "Dinosaurs in Their Time."

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THE FUTURE OF DINOSAUR HALL

The future Dinosaur Hall will showcase dinosaurs in their respective time periods, integrated into the environments of their ancient worlds.

Renovation of Dinosaur Hall - Models & Blueprints

New construction will more than double the size of the existing Dinosaur Hall, expanding skyward in a soaring three-story glass atrium that provides ample space to properly display our world-renowned dinosaur collection. Architectural changes to museum spaces, shown here in schematic plans and images of a three-dimensional model, will transform Dinosaur Hall and expand the story of this era in Earth’s history.

Click on the thumbnails to bring up full-size views.

Dinosaur Defense
The Apatosaurus skeleton currently in Dinosaur Hall will be positioned in a tableau with a never-before-exhibited juvenile Apatosaurus, protecting it from an invading predator (Allosaurus).

Dinosaur Defense (side view)

The Great Interior Seaway
The new Cretaceous Hall will feature a recreation of the remarkably diverse life that existed in a vast seaway that extended across western North America from today's Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Monstrous marine reptiles and giant sea turtles will share this part of hall with other incredible animals, such as strangely coiled ammonites and massive coral-building clams.

Predation vs. Scavenging
The museum will pose two Tyrannosaurus rex fossils, including the actual skeleton of the first one ever discovered, battling over an Edmontosaurus setting the stage for an investigation into carnivorous dinosaur behavior.

Jurassic Hall (163 - 144 million years ago)
Plants that thrived included primitive ferns and many evergreens. The dinosaurs had reached a high level of diversity. While tiny mammals, turtles, frogs, lizards, and snakes scurried about in their shadows.

Overhead view

Triassic and Jurassic Halls

Jurassic Atrium
A soaring new atrium will more than double the size of our exhibition and add several new fossil dinosaurs to our already world-famous displays.

Cretaceous Hall (115 - 65 million years ago)
The early Cretaceous witnessed a very important event - the origin of flowering plants. Mammals were still small, but becoming more diverse. Feathered non-flying dinosaurs trudged the earth, while their relatives, the birds, soared in the skies. Pterosaurs developed into incredible flying machines with some having wingspans of nearly forty feet.

Cretaceous Seaway
In the late Cretaceous, North America was divided into two parts by an immense shallow seaway that extended from the Arctic to what is today the Gulf of Mexico. These seas were teeming with life, including immense marine lizards - the mosasaurs - and many kinds of bony fishes.

THE PRESENT HALL

Today, Carnegie Museum of Natural History is home to one of the world's best collections of dinosaur fossils. Dinosaur Hall features more than a dozen skeletons in a space originally built for one. (These photographs must be credited to "Melinda McNaugher/Carnegie Museum of Natural History")

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THE HISTORY OF DINOSAUR HALL

In 1899, a year after they were dispatched to Wyoming to find dinosaurs, the Carnegie team discovered a new species, Diplodocus carnegii, which was named after its benefactor. Carnegie built Dinosaur Hall as a home for Dippy, and then shared the find with the world by creating casts for museums around the world.

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