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laelaps | November 5, 2007A mother Tyrannosaurus rex and her offspring at the end of the WWD live show.Robotic dinosaurs have long been a thorn in the side of students of paleontology; the rigid, roaring robots of the "DinoMotion" craze of the 1990's did little more than get more people into museums without providing them with any actual information about the extinct animals. Stephen Jay Gould laments this theme park treatment of dinosaurs in his essay "Dinomania" (compiled in Dinosaur in a Haystack);
As a symbol of our dilemma, consider the plight of natural history museums in the light of commercial dinomania. In…