DINOMITE.(The Talk of the Town)(American Museum of Natural History show)

Mark Norell is the all-knowing curator of the extremely cool, truly awesome, and very soon to open "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries" show at the American Museum of Natural History. "He looks just like Steve Martin," a ten-year-old whispered politely to a companion one afternoon last week, after taking in Norell's expressive eyebrows and oversized jaw and handsome, slightly supercilious smile. Norell's manner is rather early-Martinish, too--good-natured, genial, and tempered by just a little bit of asperity. (When asked if the T. rex is now widely regarded as a scavenger or as a hunter, he answers, "I think that's sort of a non-question, actually.")

The ten-year-old, hence to be called L., was there with his five-year-old sister, whom we'll label O.--L. frankly being one for whom dinosaurs are, like, so over, and O. one for whom they are also, like, so over but still a source of some worrying uncertainty. It is the existence of a generation of children who already know everything about dinosaurs and can therefore be so over them by the age of five, however, that enabled Norell to do this show: "The thing about dinosaurs is that people, even children, know the basic facts to an extraordinary degree--the comet, the carnosaurs, scavengers versus hunters--so that, paradoxically, a popular show about dinosaurs allows you to do a more sophisticated show about scientific problem-solving than you can in almost any other field in the museum."

The new exhibition will obviously be a monster for the museum, since it is filled with totally sweet animated figures and titanium-type dino skeletons, but the point of the show, surprisingly subtle and complex, is to demonstrate all the ways in which new approaches in biology increase our understanding of the history of life, and to illustrate the argumentative way in which science actually proceeds. The first issue that the show examines, for instance, is how quickly the T. rex grew and how fast it ran. The old upright Godzilla was replaced, a decade ago, by a speedy, hunched-over S.U.V. of death, but this turns out to be only a partial truth. "Using computer technology, we've been able to back-engineer his gait and his speed, and learned that an animal of this size couldn't have run more than twenty-five miles per hour," Norell explained.

"So, could you outrun a T. rex?" L. asked cautiously.

"In a sprint," Norell answered.

A nearby display demonstrates that the old idea of the apatosaurus having a long neck in order ...