At Museum, ‘RoboSue’ Roars to Life

Up now on NYTimes.com, a story I helped my Chicago News Cooperative co-worker write. He's going to have an awesome TV piece tonight on WTTW about it!

By ASH-HAR QURAISHI and RACHEL CROMIDAS

The Field Museum of Natural History this week will open an exhibit that features a reincarnated Sue — the museum’s iconic Tyrannosaurus rex — as a lifelike animatronic creature that turns its head to track visitors’ movements and lets out a loud roar.

The exhibit, which opens Wednesday and runs through Sept. 6, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the museum’s debut of Sue, the largest and most complete T. rex fossil yet discovered. The imposing, and somewhat unsettling, replica was created by Kokoro, an animatronics company based in Tokyo, and KumoTek, a robotics company, based in Texas. (John Canning Jr., chairman of the board of the Chicago News Cooperative, is also the chairman of the board of the Field Museum.)

Hilary Sanders, the museum’s project manager for exhibitions, said that when she first saw the robotic dinosaur, called RoboSue, it “made my skin crawl.” Ms. Sanders said she was eager to see how children, only those 4 and older will be admitted, would react.

Matthew Fisher, the founder of KumoTek, said that when there is no one around, the robots are doing what appear to be random behaviors. “But once the target or the human comes into play,” he said, “then the robot immediately engages that person.”

Establishing how dinosaurs would move and react to humans was tricky, said Pete Makovicky, the curator for the Sue exhibit.

“It’s really hard to decipher behavior from the fossil record because behavior doesn’t usually leave a trace,” Mr. Makovicky said. “So when it comes to the individual actions of the dinosaurs in the exhibit, a lot more of that is based on the general study of how animals react — what is plausible given what we know about the anatomy and frame of a T. rex.”

Gabe Lyon, whose foundation teaches paleontology to students, said that the scientific accuracy of the animatronic model is doubtful. “They’re not going to tell us anything real about how dinosaurs behaved, any more than ‘Jurassic Park’ is going to tell us that dinosaurs hunted in packs,” he said.

Monica Post, the director of MPR Museum Consulting, said the “wow” factor of RoboSue may help draw more people into the learning experience that museums offer. “Today, we expect so much more. We are the X-Box generation,” Ms. Post said.

RoboSue is scaled to three-quarters the size of an adult T. Rex, which in Sue’s case is more than 40 feet long and 13 feet tall at the hip.

Sue, a 67-million year-old fossil discovered in 1990 near Faith, S.D., was purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in 1997 for $8.4 million.