A roaring good time hanging out with the thunder lizards

Our son's kindergarten recently took the children to the Nature Museum for an autumn excursion. The boy came home full of excitement, exclaiming: "I saw the real dinosaurs! And their big teeth!"

I imagined my son clutching the back of another student's shirt as they filed through the exhibition hall. There must have been places at which he wanted to stay for a while but couldn't. So last weekend, we went to the museum again.

The grey edifice was built half a century ago near the western gate of the Temple of Heaven. Since July, it has been open to the public for free. But we found that this applied only to those who had made reservations. Still, the 10-yuan admission fee is quite reasonable.

In the main hall, we found the reconstructed dinosaur fossils looked much smaller than expected, even though the biggest one was more than 5 m tall and about 15 m long. Well, I have to admit that Hollywood blockbusters have led me to expect too much.

Our 3-year-old was listless in the stuffy hall and almost vanished in the crowd. But we were lucky to happen upon a group of parents with young children following a tour guide. Somehow, my son got past the crowd and said "Hello" to the amiable guide. Then we followed the group around.

It turns out that a dark wall displaying some gruesome skeletons was the famous "Nine-Dragon Wall", featuring the fossils of nine young dinosaurs found in today's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. They were some 200 million years old.

When paleontologists tried to move the wall to Beijing in the 1960s, they had to cut the priceless treasure in two to transport it.

Chinese emperors had considered themselves "real dragons", and screen walls featuring nine dragons can be found in the Forbidden City, Beihai Park and other such places.

I wonder, if the nine dinosaurs - konglong (horrific dragons) - were found in ancient days, would they be considered proof of the emperors' supremacy? Or would they simply be destroyed as bad omens?

On the second floor, we found the world's most intact dinosaur nest containing the largest number of eggs. The 29 eggs, each the size of two chicken eggs, were carefully laid by their mother in three layers, so each could get sunshine and enjoy a greater likelihood of hatching. Wow, that's proof of the universal character of maternal love!

The hall named "Dinosaur World" provides visitors better places to take photos with life-sized models. From a platform on a hillside, one can look through binoculars set in a tyrannosaur's head to get a sense of what the predators saw when they were on the prowl.

The video room beneath the platform grabbed my son's attention with a documentary about marine life. I thought some scenes were rather bloody, but a boy of about age 6 had obviously seen the film many times, as he pronounced the dinosaurs' names accurately even before the narrator did.

At his age, my son often annoys me with the shortness of his attention span. But he stayed glued to the screen with great interest.

Would my boy become a paleontologist? It doesn't matter. I just hope he can maintain this curiosity and awe of nature.

(China Daily 10/21/2008 page20)