Students enjoy museum's exhibit of dinosaur bones

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How long can you keep a secret? Southern Nevada has kept a secret for more than 100 million years: It once was the home of dinosaurs.

The bones of beasts we know best from movies were discovered recently in Southern Nevada. They are on display at the Nevada State Museum, 700 Twin Lakes Drive, inside Lorenzi Park, until Dec. 31.

The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

On Nov. 7, fourth-graders from Lummis Elementary School visited the museum. The dinosaur bones were one of the first things they checked out. Students' comments included calling them cool, fascinating and looking really old. The bones were in a small display case near a full skeleton of a woolly mammoth.

"When she said the museum had 'bones,' I thought they'd be all set up like that (the mammoth)," said Bryce Wickham, 9.

"Those are bones?" said Brooke Allen, 9. "I thought we'd be seeing them, like, more like how human bones look like."

Michael Monteleone, 9, said if he was out hiking and found the small fragments, "I'd know right away they were from a dinosaur."

The bones will be on display at the new Nevada State Museum, which opens in the summer of 2009, after they give up their secrets to science.

Staffers at the current museum site have secrets of their own. They're all stashed in the back storage rooms of the museum, off limits to the general public.

These secrets might be 50 years old, such as the taxidermied animal specimens, or they might be millions of years old.

"Normally museums only display 2 to 5 percent of the items they have," said Barbara Adams, the museum's curator of natural history. "The rest are saved for study purposes."

She gave a private tour of the 20-by-40-foot storage room, one of three that holds items. The rooms are kept cool to preserve items and discourage mold, fleas, cockroaches and beetles. The taxidermied specimens are kept with items such as minerals that do not attract fleas.

When it comes to bugs, "anything that was once alive is food," said Barbara Slivac, curator of education.

Awaiting their chance to be on display were fossilized camel tracks that were several million years old and a cast of a giant sloth that dates back to the Ice Age.

Then there were the mammoth tusks and jaw found in the Centennial Hills area. They are about 15,000 years old. The museum also has a huge vertebrae from the state's best-known extinct reptile, the ichthyosaur.

Findings of the fossilized remains once were so common, Adams told how the miners in the olden days "used them for dinner plates."

The staff will have to transport an estimated 60,000 objects to the new facility. Because many items are in storage, they already are packed, but some, such as the butterflies mounted midair on pins, are so fragile that vibration can cause them to disintegrate. The staff plans to rent air-ride trucks to make the move as gentle as possible.

"Still, you always hold your breath," Adams said.

Right now, the museum is in the process of reviewing exhibit displays and detailed books prepared for the task. One is two inches thick and includes display case heights, exact placement of items and lighting details. Another is filled with nothing but the graphics that will accompany each piece.

But the prospect of the new 79,000-square-foot building and all it will bring the community overrides any hard work necessary to get it up and running.

"My favorite part is that people can take what they learn from the exhibits and take that knowledge out into the real world," said Greta Brunschwyler, director. "For example, if they're out driving and they see a Joshua tree, they'll know it's indicative of a certain elevation in the desert. That's what I'm excited about. Dinosaurs don't do it for me."