Computer-aided paleontology: a new look for dinosaurs

Over the past 150 years, our perception of how dinosaurs looked has changed on the basis of museum displays and artists´ renditions. Reproductions of lumbering dinosaurs at London´s Crystal Palace during the mid 1800s look little like the creatures in the 40-year-old murals at Yale University´s Peabody Museum of Natural History, or the computer-animated images of agile animals depicted in the Jurassic Park movies and recent television documentaries. Now, researchers are combining techniques from computer-aided design, rapid prototyping, and biomechanics to develop more accurate theories of dinosaurs´ posture and movements. This information will affect paleontologists´ concepts of how the animals lived and what they ate. Perhaps the most notable example of this synergy of paleontology and computing-related fields has been the restoration of the Smithsonian Institution´s trademark dinosaur -a triceratops mounted some 90 years ago - as part of a refurbishing of the dinosaur hall in the Smithsonian´s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC