This megalosaurus for instance is a shame walking on all four legs, but we now know he would have be bipedal if he would have stood on just his hind legs and his forelegs would have been quite small and lifted it right up off the ground. When the first iguanodon was discovered, only one thumbone was found. So paleontologists thought it must have been a horn. But an iguanodon didn’t have a horn. It was easy to walk amongst these massive models and to laugh at the 19th-century idea of what a dinosaur was like. We now know so much more. We’ve worked at a phenomenal amount about dinosaurs. But how have we done that? How do you start to get close to animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago?

 

From 19th century London to 21st century Los Angeles, 150 years after the first ever dinosaur exhibition, I want to know how we can be sure that we’re now getting it right. So I’ve come to L.A.’s museum of natural history.

 

The museum is undergoing major redevelopment at the moment. At central visual is a multi-million-dollar dinosaur exhibit. Luis Chiappe is director of the museum’s dinosaur institute and curator of the new exhibition.

 

Hello, Louis. Hello.

 

How are you? 

 

I’m very well. Nice to meet you.

 

Likewise. 

 

He’ll be packing the exhibition with everything we know about dinosaurs from the smallest to the biggest with the latest science on how they looked, moved and interacted.