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by Mary Kirkaldy
Dateline: Canada, March 1999
Dinosaurs on Broadway!
(Well, Near Broadway? 35 blocks from Broadway?)
Famous World War II play by Thornton Wilder stars Dinos and a Wooly
Mammoth!
by Edward Summer
Godzilla
is
not the only big animal that romps around in Central Park.-- Now, the
park has a dinosaur, too! Lucky residents of the Big Apple can see it starring
in a famous comedy by three time Pulitzer Prize winning (Our Town, The
Skin of Our Teeth, The Bridge at San Luis Rey) author Thornton Wilder
called The Skin of Our Teeth. Written during World War II, it is
an allegory (a story with a hidden meaning -- Vera) that talks about
how human beings always manage to survive no matter what happens to them!
They always escape by the... er... skin of their teeth. (Hmm our teeth
don't have skin, do yours? Well, never mind. Anyway...)
The Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival puts on plays outdoors in New York's Central Park every summer. They wanted to get the T. rex from Jurassic Park to make a guest appearance, but she was just too, too busy! Instead, actor Michael H. Fielder dresses up in an awesome dinosaur costume designed by Candice Donnelly and tries to eat everybody on stage. Yipes! There is also a wooly mammoth wandering around because part of the play takes place during The Ice Age.
Did we mention before that this is a WEIRD play? No? Well, let's get things clear right away then. This is a weird play. Part of it takes place in The Ice Age like we said, and part takes place during Noah's Flood, and part takes place in modern times! The whole story covers 5,000 years of real and imaginary history. "The Skin of Our Teeth, which takes five thousand years to go by, is really a way of trying to make sense out of the multiplicity of the human race and its affections," said Wilder.
Besides the dinosaur, the main characters are Mr. and Mrs. George Antrobus of Excelsior, NJ. and their two children Gladys and Henry. Their maid Sabina is an important character, too. Sabina talks to the audience a lot, and sometimes she chases away the dinosaur. The Skin of Our Teeth is an important experimental play that "blurred" the difference between the play's actors and the audience. Even though, in real life, people did not exist at the same time as dinosaurs, it suits this story to pretend that it was true.
It actually played ON Broadway in 1942 when the United States was at war with Germany and Japan. People were very, very worried about whether or not human beings would survive this terrible war. Originally directed by Elia Kazan (who directed "On The Waterfront" which was just selected as one of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time), The Skin of Our Teeth starred a dinosaur played by someone we don't know. It also starred Fredric (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) March, Florence Eldridge, Tallulah Bankhead, and Montgomery Clift.
This new 1998 Production is directed by Irene Lewis. It stars (like
we said) Michael H. Fielder as the Dinosaur. The humans are
John
("Roseanne") Goodman, Frances (The Crucible) Conway as
Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, and Kristen (Third Rock From The Sun) Johnston
as Sabina.
If you live in or are visiting New York City, you can see this play for FREE from Friday, June 12 - Sunday, July 12, 1998 at the Delacorte Theater. For more information call the Box Office at (212) 260-2400, or visit the theater's website at www.publictheater.org.
Resources
Thornton
Niven Wilder Website
Big
Bite from Mosasaur Backbone!
by Mike Everhart
Paleoworld -- the Learning Channel TV show -- was interested in an unusual fossil found in 1995: a twelve inch section of vertebrae that had been bitten out of the back of a 20 foot long mosasaur by a 15 foot Cretoxyrhina shark about 85 million years ago. Some of the shark's teeth had broken off and were still embedded in the vertebrae, and the surface of the bone was pitted by the shark's stomach acid.
On Monday, April 7, 1997, the advance film crew from Wall to Wall Television of London, England flew into Hays, Kansas, soon to be met by a truck load of lighting equipment that drove in from Kansas City.
A cold north wind was blowing across the Kansas prairie, and the underdressed film crew had to make a stop at Walmart for warm clothing before we drove about 75 miles to the site where the Ancient Shark specimen had been found.
After meeting the owner of the property, Alex, the director/producer, reviewed the plan of the day's filming with Julian and Chris, his assistants. I wandered around trying to be useful, and soon realized that most of my day was going to be spent waiting for the crew to get ready to film. I didn't know that was the normal way of doing things in the film business.
The crew first shot a panorama of the Smoky Hill chalk (an ancient sea bottom from about 85 million years ago), then a lot of footage of me climbing around on the rocks. It seemed like did the same shot over and over again from several differnt angles. Finally we did a shot of me "finding" a shark's tooth and explaining about where it came from, and also about the stratigraphy of the Smoky mountain chalk. A cold north wind was blowing up my back while I tried to talk, and it didn't seem like I was doing a very good job of telling the story! It will be interesting to see how it finally looks in the show.
In the afternoon, we "re-created" the discovery of the mosasaur vertebrae. First we buried the specimen in a convincing manner. Then they set up and did a take of me digging it up again. They used two cameras, one of which shot less than 24 frames per second so that it will look faster when they run it back.
After we finished with the shark bite specimen, we moved to a new site where I had dug up a four foot mosasaur skull which is pretty big as mosasaur skulls go and came from an animal that was about 30 feet long!
Alex wanted to use that discovery as a lead in for the Ancient Sharks episode. We shot things from different angles and did several re-takes of crucial shots where I explained about how mosasaurs lived in the Late Cretaceous (135 to 65 million years ago). Thank goodness we finished just before sun down: we had spent over 10 cold, windy hours there! I was freezing!
On Wednesday, we filmed at the historic Sternberg Museum at Fort Hays State University. The staff moved everything around for us and set up a lab bench where the mosasaur vertebrae could be examined and we could re-stage the finding of the evidence for the shark bite.
It was really snowing outside, but it was nice and warm inside, so it was much easier to be in front of the camera and be coherent this time! After several takes of me explaining how the shark had gouged a big chunk of bone and flesh out of the mosasaur, the crew filmed various exhibits in the museum.
It was nice being a movie star, but they forgot to send my limo and, of course, this was a volunteer job! Since the weather was worsening rapidly, and my part was done, I said my good-byes about 4:30 and drove myself down the interstate in the freezing rain. Ancient Sharks, the tentative title, won't be broadcast for several more months though! Watch for it on Paleoworld! If you think I look great, be sure to tell Steven Spielberg I'm available.
Mike Everhart has a Masters Degree in zoology. He has collected fossils for most of his life and is primarily nterested in marine vertebrates from the Smoky Hill chalk from western Kansas, U.S.A He has worked in the environmental field in Public Health and industry for the last 24 years. You can e-mail Mike! Or you can visit his cool website on Oceans of Kansas Paleontology!
Did you ever wonder where dragons came from? The oldest
dragons came from China. And, believe it or not, dragons and dinosaurs
are related!
Many centuries ago, Chinese peasants found huge bones in Mongolia and many other places. They had no idea what animal these bones came from. So they named them "leong" bones. "Leong" in Mandarin Chinese means "dragon." Did you ever see a Jackie Chan movie? Well, Jackie's Chinese name is Chan Leong which also means dragon. What they didn't know is that these bones really came from dinosaurs!
The Chinese people believed that dragons were great forces of nature: they controlled wind and rain and other things. They also believed that if you made medicine from "dragon" bones, it could cure many problems. Even today, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) includes "recipes" with "dragon"bones even though there is not much evidence that any of these "concoctions" really cure anything!
Thankfully, the Chinese government protects what we now know are dinosaur
bones. In Chinese dinosaurs are called "kuan leong" which includes the
word for dragon. Some greedy people still steal the dinosaur bones to sell
them to superstitious people to use for medicine! But mostly TCM uses cow
bones and other kinds of bones instead. And the wonderful dinosaur bones
are preserved carefully and studied by many paleontologists such as Mark
Norell from AMNH. You can see them both in China and in New York City at
the AMNH. 
"A
dog," says Einstein, "finds a bone sticking up from the ground in a field.
He begins to dig to get the entire bone. He digs and digs and digs until
he uncovers not one bone, but hundreds of bones! The dog finds an entire
dinosaur! The dog is so excited and so tired, he dies. But, he dies
in ecstasy! "
Einstein? Einstein? Who is Einstein anyway?
Albert Einstein Online Check out this Einstein guy, maybe. (Maybe not.)
John said:
There were some non-dinosaurs picked: Kronosaurus,
Dimetrodon, and Deinosuchus, and some modern Dinosaurs (birds): Falcon,
Bald Eagle, Penquin, and Parakeet.
