Rice University’s Student Newspaper — Since 1916

Sunday, November 24, 2024 — Houston, TX

Alfonso Zapata


NEWS 10/9/08 7:00pm

Dinosaur mummy exciting in the abstract, disappointing in person

Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation is the new dinosaur exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The main attraction is Leonardo, the first ever fossilized dinosaur mummy. Seeing as how it's close to Halloween, when the word "mummy" is mentioned, my mind immediately jumps to Boris Karloff. I was stoked to see this dinosaur mummy. A T-Rex wrapped in T.P.? Sign me up!Unfortunately, when they say "mummy," they don't mean King Tut. They mean a dead dinosaur that dried out and mummified before turning into a fossil. And Leonardo isn't exactly one of the cooler dinosaurs, either. He's a Brachylophosaurus, which is a type of hadrosaur. Remember The Land Before Time? Remember Ducky, that annoying little dinosaur who would always say "Yup, yup, yup!" in a really high-pitched voice? That's Leonardo.


NEWS 4/10/08 7:00pm

Walking with dinosaurs spares much expense

Walking With Dinosaurs? More like Walking With Dino-SNORES! Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience should have been amazing. With a $92.5 million budget, it should have been balls-to-the-wall dinosaur action. It should have provided lots of dinosaur carnage for the bloodthirsty first-grader inside of me. It should have shown dinosaurs that caused the Toyota Center to tremble with each step. It should have boggled the minds of young children everywhere and then blown them away with a mighty roar. But it didn't. What it did have was a couple of incredibly lifelike robot dinosaurs that didn't really do anything.The dinosaurs are very detailed. Their skin hangs off of them like a fat lady's cellulite, their tails sway back and forth with every step they take and one can even count the number of teeth inside their giant dinosaur mouths. Much time and effort has obviously been spent on making them look as realistic as possible, or like what one might imagine dinosaurs looked like back then.