Review: 'Back to the Cretaceous' at the Smithsonian


If you visit the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, you can watch the 3-D IMAX film "Back to the Cretaceous."

As "Back to the Cretaceous" begins, we meet young Ally Hayden, a docent at the (fictional) Natural History Museum. Ally dreams of doing field work in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada with her father, paleontologist Dr. Donald Hayden, but her father feels that it would be too dangerous. Instead, Ally must content herself with giving tours to visitors of the museum, and to her own dinosaur research.

Dr. Hayden discovers a strange object during his field work in Canada. It looks almost like it could be a dinosaur egg, but he doesn't want to say that it is until he is certain. Dr. Hayden brings the "egg" back to the museum, where he plans to examine it further in the fossil preparation laboratory.

Ally visits her father in the prep lab to show him some of her research that she is working on as part of a school project, but Dr. Hayden is called away. Ally accidentally bumps the "egg" that is lying on Dr. Hayden's desk, and it rolls onto the floor! As Ally runs to snatch up the "egg," a strange mist pours out of it, but otherwise the "egg" seems okay. After returning the "egg" to her father's desk, Ally sits back down at the computer to work on her project, when the lights suddenly go out.

As she goes searching for her father in the darkened museum, Ally sees a series of hallucinations or visions, possibly caused by the strange mist from the "egg." She travels back in time to meet dinosaur artist Charles R. Knight and paleontologist Barnum Brown. Both give her advice about her research, and encourage her to go into the field with her father. She also sees ptersosaurs, hadrosaurs, and velociraptors as she travels back 65 million years to the Cretaceous Period (140 to 65 million years ago).

The most terrifying, and most rewarding, part of her adventure is when Ally encounters a Tyrannosaurus rex. Ally is frightened, but she is able to save the egg of the T. rex from being stolen, and to touch the nose of the T. rex. When Ally is reunited with her father in the present, she confidently tells him that he definitely has a T. rex egg.

The copyright of the article Review: 'Back to the Cretaceous' at the Smithsonian in Paleontology is owned by Beverly Eschberger. Permission to republish Review: 'Back to the Cretaceous' at the Smithsonian in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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