You'd think the science on something as old as dinosaurs would be settled by now. But a traveling exhibition on its way to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh sends a different message:

You probably don't know dinosaurs as well as you think you do. Technology is changing what we used to understand about the way prehistoric animals looked, moved and behaved.

"Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries" was organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in collaboration with the museums it has visited: the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Field Museum in Chicago and the Raleigh museum.

It opened in 2005, the year Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist at N.C. State University, announced the discovery of soft tissue inside a dinosaur bone. It had been thought that only fossilized bones remained, so Schweitzer's discovery could offer new information about the biology of dinosaurs.

By the time the evolving exhibition reaches North Carolina, Schweitzer's findings should be reflected.

Another Raleigh contribution is NCSU paleontologist Julia Clarke's work in China, which indicates that the animals had skin and feathers, providing additional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Schweitzer's and Clarke's ongoing research will be a permanent part of the museum's new wing, the Nature Research Center, which is scheduled to open in 2010.

Until then, "Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries" has plenty to explore. The exhibit's centerpiece is a 700-square-foot diorama of a Chinese forest that will take visitors into the Mesozoic era. It has been described as the most detailed re-creation of a prehistoric environment that has ever been built.

The show also features a mechanical Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton (the better to calculate how fast Malcolm would have to run in "Jurassic Park"); a 60-foot-long model of an Apatosaurus skeleton (the animation includes new data about that long neck and tail); and a re-creation of the Davenport Ranch Trackway in Texas. The dinosaur prints unearthed there 70 years ago are still yielding new ideas.

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