Above: Trilobites, fossil ferns and Diprotodon - all a bit older than me.  (Source: Museum Victoria)

Time is an odd sort of thing – I’m always losing it, but you can never get it back. For example, one year ago, my son wasn’t even born. Ten years ago, I was still at University. A thousand years ago, Vikings were doing their thing in Europe . A million years ago, ancestral humans hadn’t even formed recognisable civilisations. But 600 million years? It almost goes without saying, but that’s a very long time ago. As you can probably guess, quite a bit has changed on our planet in that time.

One of the challenges we’re facing with our new exhibitions in the Science and Life Gallery redevelopment is to make this sort of timescale comprehensible – the amount of time is so big that it is hard to wrap your head around. The first of the four exhibitions to open will be Dinosaur Walk, displaying dinosaur skeletons and others, aims to summarise the last 253 million years of land vertebrate evolution, starting just before the age of the dinosaurs, passing through the Mesozoic where dinosaurs, flying and marine reptiles ruled their domains, through to their extinction and the eventual rise (and demise) of the megafauna.

So how do you fit something as mind-bogglingly vast as hundreds of millions of years into an exhibition space less than 50 metres long at Melbourne Museum ? The answers to that are, with careful selection of display objects, some very clever (and patient) exhibition designers and an equally talented exhibition team!

An artists reconstruction of Pteranodon, one of the better known Pterosaurs. Artist: Kate Nolan

In a strange way, I feel sorry for some fossils. Take the flying reptiles (or Pterosaurs, with a silent “P”), for example – a group of unique animals that arose, flourished and diversified into myriad forms during the Mesozoic Era. Their success and diversity was over-shadowed for the most part, however, by the other dominant and better-known animals in the Mesozoic – the dinosaurs.

There is a misconception that the pterosaurs are a kind of flying dinosaur; not so, the Pterosaurs are a separate branch of the reptilian family tree distinct from the more popular land-lubbing dinos and those other underdogs of the Mesozoic, the marine reptiles. Pterosaurs (and their mates in the oceans) always seem to play second fiddle to dinosaurs, often relegated to second billing.…Pterosaurs didn’t even rate an appearance in the first Jurassic Park film, for example.

Part of the problem for the poor old Pterosaurs is their relative scarcity. This isn’t their fault – Pterosaurs needed to have small, lightweight bones so they could fly. Small, lightweight bones don’t preserve as fossils nearly as well as thumping great dinosaur bones, so as a consequence we find relatively fewer pterosaur fossils than dinosaur ones.

Some Pterosaurs were tiny, little larger than a sparrow, still others were truly enormous, and are the biggest animals ever to fly. The new skeleton display opening in the Easter holidays at Melbourne Museum will have the largest of all the known Pterosaurs, with an equally enormous name – Quetzalcoatlus, or as I’ll call her, Suzie Q.

Artist reconstruction of Mamenchisaurus feeding - other digestive activity not shown. Artist: Kate Nolan

Imagine for a moment spending a day in the life of a Mamenchisaurus hundereds of millions of years ago. You wake up, and the first thing you want to do is eat, and then maybe go to the toilet. Ok, after that, what next? Well, not much – eating plant material, pooing and farting would’ve taken up a large part of the waking hours of a Mamenchisaurus.

Without wanting to be too childish, this fascinates me. It’s not a lifestyle I recommend as a human, but giant sauropod dinosaurs like Mamenchisaurus had little choice - in order to keep their enormous bodies nourished, Mamenchisaurus would’ve needed to feed on plants like conifers and ferns pretty much all their waking hours.

That alone sounds like hard work, but when you consider Mamenchisaurus didn’t even chew their food, that’s impressive. Imagine swallowing mouthfuls of leaves whole, especially going down the world’s longest neck!

Then, when their strictly vegan diet reached the Mamenchisaurus belly, the real fun began – churning and squeezing the plant material for all its worth, and using bacteria in the gut to help break down the plant fibres so the nutrients can be absorbed. Helpful as this bacteria was in digesting the plant fibres, it also meant that a lot of gas was produced in the dinosaur’s belly – and we all know what that means.

So, when you come to see the new Skeleton exhibition at Melbourne Museum opening in Easter 2009 and you see Mamenchisaurus skeleton at full stretch, prepare to be blown away – but thankfully, not literally!

Better the pebble you know: these rocks will be part of a touchable display about how some dinosaurs used stones in their 'gizzards' to digest their food.

A curator’s desk is a landscape – there are lofty peaks formed by stacks of books, sweeping plains of printed text for labels, and little gullies where biros and pencils congregate. I can’t tidy up this landscape – it would disrupt the ecology of my work as an Exhibition Curator.

Today, some new features appeared on this vista in the form of some bags of rounded pebbles. I suspect I’ll need to explain this a little further – pebble collecting is not a hobby, its part of my job.

In April 2009, the first phase of the redevelopment of the Science and Life Gallery at Melbourne Museum will open to the public. It will be a wonderful experience for the visitor, allowing people to have a unique perspective on skeletons of Dinosaurs, flying reptiles, megafauna and more. One of the unique experiences we want to achieve is to let people use their sense of touch in the exhibition. There are many precious/fragile objects we can’t let them touch, but one of my tasks recently has been to find objects we are happy to say ‘please do touch’. So, I have been thinking of how we could do this, and to source some objects that fit the bill. In a lot of cases, we are encouraging people to feel the teeth of the dinosaurs and their friends, but there’s a problem – some dinosaurs didn’t have teeth.

Toothless (or, if you prefer, ‘edentulous’) dinosaurs obviously needed to find alternative ways to break down their food. We know that at least one group of dinosaurs got around this “can’t chew” conundrum by deliberately swallowing stones that churned around in their bellies, pulverising their food; many birds do this still to this day.

It is these pebbles, called gizzard stones (or gastroliths) that are perched on my desk (sorry, “landscape”) that eventually you will be invited to feel in the new displays, along with a variety of dinosaur teeth and a few other surprises in the new exhibition.

Stay tuned for more, there’s the tale of the ancient fossilised poo coming soon….