Fearsome Creatures Visit Mall Exhibit Makes Dinosaurs Seem Real Enough To Bite

He was an Albertasaurus. Yes, from Alberta, B.C. - sort of a Tyrannosaurus Rex Junior.

He was still for a minute, a statue.

Then he swung his ugly head around, opened his pink maw and let loose a gaping, jagged-toothed howl.

A baby screamed, then went pterodactyl and tried to flee its stroller. A gray-haired woman clicked a camera wildly. Her eyes were larger than the lens.

“If they were alive, I wouldn’t be standin’ here!” Inez Burnham trumped. “You wouldn’t even see my dust.” Then she turned again to the nowsilent giant.

“OK, big boy - open up!”

North Idaho regressed a few million years this weekend, a time warp it will endure for three more months. “The Story of Egg Mountain” opened Saturday in the Bonner Mall and was greeted by wave-upon-wave of biped mammals and their young. By early afternoon Sunday, about 600 had paid up to walk through.

“This is beautiful,” Burnham said, husband Russ nodding along. “This is the thrill of my life seeing how these these things were.”

Operative word here: were. “I’m so glad to see they’re extinct,” Burnham said as the terror of Canada cocked its head and regarded her with a plastic leer.- “Especially that!”

The exhibit produced by Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies and Japan’s Kokoro Dinosaurs has never been to a mall before. It’s typically a mechanized museum piece, shown in places like New York, San Diego and Chicago.

But through luck and a canceled exhibit, mall marketing director Diane Williams was able to snag the critters. They had been booked through 1998.

The display tells the story of a dig near Choteau, Mont., where dinosaur remains were discovered in 1978. The finds led John Horner, a paleontologist and advisor to “Jurassic Park,” to conclude that dinosaurs weren’t loners, but lived in colonies - like “Egg Mountain.”

The display has three large, robotic monsters and several smaller ones. Skeleton mock-ups greet visitors at the door. Some examples of the real thing are protected behind glass cases. A narrated, animated display of toy-sized dinosaurs tells the whole tale.

The big robots, though, got the gasps. A mother Maiasaura - roughly elephant-sized - bends down and checks on her nest. Newborns quiver, still emerging from their eggs. Mom stands up, looks right at you, then bellows.

A bony-helmeted Chasmosaurus (sort of like a Triceratops) growls. Michelle Dexter, a 2-year-old piled in her arms, stopped close right when that happened.

“Ow! Get away from me!” yelped 2-year-old Makaela.

A room away, 4-year-old Walker Jones spied a friend from school. “I saw Rex!” he stammered. “He scared me. I scared myself.”

Walker loves dinosaurs. His favorite flick is “The Land Before Time.” And even though he could barely stand the roaring of the models, they still weren’t enough.

He looked up at his mom, confused. “I thought there’d be real ones in here.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo