July 7, 2000

After Hours

Dinosaur museum open in Utah

LEHI, Utah (AP) -- The age of the dinosaurs is long gone, but the giant beasts may still be able to usher in a new era of tourism in Utah.

Paleontologists and dinosaur admirers already flock to a host of separate hot spots around the state and the region, from the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding to the exhibits at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah to the Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border, which draws half a million visitors a year.

Palentologists and state tourism officials hope the new North American Museum of Ancient Life will tie the various sites together and solidify Utah's reputation as a prehistoric attraction.

"We just think the whole thing is going to be an excellent addition to the dinosaur attractions in Utah," said Spencer Kinard, assistant director of the Utah Travel Council. The new museum in a metropolitan area could prove a jumping-off point for visitors to venture to other parts of the state, he said.

The first phase of the museum is set to open July 8 at Thanksgiving Point, 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. The rest will be ready in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Touted as the first major museum in the United States devoted solely to the prehistoric beasts, the $24 million, 122,000-square-foot museum will feature 50 casts of dinosaur skeletons, hands-on exhibits, a research facility and a theater to show IMAX movies.

"All the people who work with dinosaurs in the state have been anticipating this for quite a while," said Dan Chure, a research scientist at Dinosaur National Monument, which features a dinosaur quarry where visitors can see more than 1,500 fossil bones. "It may be that this becomes the museum around which the state can emphasize dinosaur tourism. Everyone would benefit from it."

The museum, a private venture between Western Paleontological Laboratories, Quantum Management and Thanksgiving Point Development, looks like the set of the movie "Jurassic Park."

The collection will include a Utahraptor, along with three Stegosauruses and the first displayed skeleton of the 110-foot long Supersaurus, according to executive director Bill Bridges. There will also be two species discovered by Western Paleontological Laboratories: the Hesperisaurus and the Gargoyleosaurus, an armored animal with a head like a gargoyle.

About a dozen skeletons will be ready this month for public viewing in the museum's first phase, as well as an exhibit called "Raising Giants," which features a participatory quarry dig.

Oregon man says he saw Bigfoot

SELMA, Ore. (AP) -- Grants Pass psychologist Matthew Johnson insists he's not crazy.

Even when he tells people that he heard, smelled and saw the Pacific Northwest's mythical Bigfoot while hiking Saturday with his family at the Oregon Caves National Monument.

"It was very tall, it was very hairy," Johnson said. "It was nothing else but a Sasquatch. I swear to God."

Johnson said he was squatting in the woods near one of the monument's backwoods trails when he spotted the creature standing upright about 60 feet away, hiding behind a tree and spying on his wife and three children.

He said shortly before the sighting, his family had just detected a pungent, musky scent on the trail and heard some deep, guttural groans in the woods nearby, as if the sound was following them.

"I lived a lot of years in Alaska," Johnson said. "I've been chased by a grizzly bear. This was no bear."

Johnson said he ran off to get his family and report the sighting to monument rangers.

Rangers checked the area Sunday and found "nothing unusual," monument Superintendent Craig Akerman said.

But the incident has caught the attention of Bigfoot researchers in Northern California, who spent part of Monday retracing the Johnson family's steps along the monument's Big Tree Trail.

Johnson said the researchers, accompanied by a monument ranger, found some partial prints in the area.

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is the name given to a large, hairy, ape-like creature reportedly living clandestinely in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

This was the first known report of a Sasquatch sighting at the monument, Akerman said.

Minnesota Zoo exhibit a little too real

APPLE VALLEY, Minn. (AP) -- The Minnesota Zoo's newest exhibit introduces visitors to the harsh realities of family farming, complete with cloned animals, cattle locked up in tiny pens and the inevitable end, the slaughterhouse.

The $4.3 million Wells Fargo Family Farm is aimed toward reintroducing Minnesotans to farming -- and to the controversial issues that sometimes surround it.

"Without doubt, people are going to be upset with some of what they see," said Jim Streater, who is in charge of the zoo's biological programs.

That's intentional.

When the Children's Zoo closed in 1994, plans to construct an idyllic "Old MacDonald" farm with child-friendly animals gradually matured to a more realistic portrayal of farming, Streater said.

"In Old MacDonald's farm nothing ever dies," he said. "Real farming is about birth, nurtured life and death."

So along with friendly goats that children have fed at the zoo's "My Backyard" exhibit for years, the zoo farm will feature rare breeds, cutting-edge technology and a large dose of reality.

By letting visitors see a sow restrained to a constricting farrowing pen and cloned heifers racing each other across open fields, zoo officials hope agricultural issues will become less abstract to many Minnesotans long divorced from the land.

"We often take for granted the things that used to be most familiar," said Lars Erdahl, who directs the zoo's education programs. "What we're trying to do is not advocate for a certain position, but show people what our source of food is."

When zoo officials met with Twin Cities-area schoolchildren several years ago while planning the farm, they found many had a "grocery-store mentality," and didn't connect neatly packaged foods with farm animals like calves or chicks.

"This is our first opportunity to talk about death at the zoo," said Kim Thomas, who managed the zoo farm project.

Many animals born and raised at the zoo farm will be sold to slaughterhouses. And with displays in every barn and pen that show what products come from each animal, the reality of a working farm will not be hidden from visitors.

Of course, accommodating 1 million visitors annually has required concessions.

To keep the exhibit aromatic, some of agriculture's traditional byproducts will be carefully monitored.

"When poop hits the ground, somebody shovels it right up," Streater said. Until the zoo builds an onsite composting facility for the farm, a dump truck full of manure will be hauled out of the farm daily.

For understanding day-to-day reality and how vast those amber waves of grain are, nothing beats a true family farm, said Al Withers, a state employee who helps teachers find ways to teach their students about agriculture. Hundreds of such farms have opened to visitors in the last decade, but the zoo's farm is still needed, Withers said: "They'll reach a million people that I can't reach."