• Giants are in the spotlight in 'Mammoths and Mastodons' exhibit

  • Babies. They're irresistible, right? Especially when they're kittens, panda bears and chimps.
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    • If you go ...
      What: "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age"
      When: Through Jan. 13, 2013
      Where: Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, Boston
      Tickets: with regular Exhibits Halls admission - $22, $20...
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      If you go ...

      When: Through Jan. 13, 2013

      Where: Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, Boston

      Tickets: with regular Exhibits Halls admission - $22, $20 for ages 60 and older, $19 for ages 3 to 11

      Information: (617) 723-2500 or www.mos.org
    How about a 40,000-year-old baby wooly mammoth?
    Meet Lyuba, one of the stars of "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age," a traveling exhibit created at the Field Museum in Chicago which is on tour and at Boston's Museum of Science through Jan. 13. The actual remains of Lyuba were on display for nine months at the original Chicago exhibit, but they're Russian-owned and back in the homeland now. On the road now is a life-size replication.
    Lyuba — pronounced Lee-OO-bah — was found intact by a Siberian reindeer herder and two of his sons in 2007. It quickly shot to the top of the scientific charts, as the best preserved specimen of her kind. Lyuba, by the way, means love in Russian, and it was also the nickname of the herder's wife.
    The Museum of Science exhibit, with more than 250 pieces, features an exact replica of Lyuba's body, along with CT scans and other displays that pose theories about her and the world she inhabited — although Lyuba wasn't part of that world for very long. She was healthy, but only a month old when she died, apparently trapped in a sudden mudslide. Her trunk was filled with silt, and she was covered with sediment. Her body was preserved in the permafrost, and the bacteria and acid in her system served to "pickle" her body.
    The first thing you'll see upon entering the exhibit is a fictional time-lapse photography style film shot all over North America. It starts with a present-day city and quickly spins back in time, all the way to 20,000 years ago. So you move from the tall buildings of today to the empty, grassy plains where animals use to roam. You may spot Native Americans for a split second as we reel backwards. The film gives you a sense of the vastness of time and the scope of change, to say nothing of the brevity and impermanence of our existence.
    It's recommended that you start touring the 7,500-square foot hall in a clockwise fashion. After looking at and reading about bones (including some mastodon bones discovered by William Clark of Lewis & Clark, once part of Thomas Jefferson's collection), tusks and skeletal remains, you'll come across the towering replicas. Lyuba, of course, is one of the creatures, but as a baby, not so imposing. Others are more so, like the Giant Ice Age Bear, aka the short-faced bear (Arctodus), who was the largest carnivore in North America during the last of the Pleistocene Epoch. And there's a pretty ferocious-looking 14-foot-high Columbian mammoth. Also, an early ancestor (Moeritherium) and a dwarf mammoth. Along with the mammoths and mastodons — the two species are considered "cousins" — is a fierce, open-jawed, scimitar-toothed creature called a Homotherium. He was a major mammoth and mastodon predator.
    "The most important take-away is getting a sense of what these animals were really like, fully fleshed out, to get a really visceral feeling," says Eric Dewar, associate professor of biology at Suffolk University. "Everyone has no idea there were animals this big."
    Dewar spoke at a press gathering at the Museum of Science along with Paul Fontaine, the museum's vice president of education and Hilary Hansen-Sanders, traveling exhibitions manager for the Field Museum. (We later talked with Dewar and Hansen-Sanders by phone.)
    Unlike dinosaurs, these creatures — weighing up to 8 tons, sporting tusks up to 16 feet — actually shared their time on the planet with early humans, the scientific term being "modern humans." The animals roamed Europe, Asia and North America from 17 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago.
    "The exhibit is about what the biology of the animals was like," Dewar says, "and the interaction with people. Not just about people hunting them, but artifactual evidence, the representational art. The etching of mammoths on mammoth ivory, that was clearly on their minds, not just 'How do we take down the little ones to eat?' These people, the Cro-Magnon people, are the beginning of what we consider fully not to be Neanderthals, but really, us. If you took a person from the Pleistocene era and gave them a shave and a shower, they would not look out of place on the subway."
    Why did the mammoths and mastodons vanish? "The top level information," says Hansen-Sanders, "is that is it was, 1) overhunting by human beings, which exceeded reproduction; 2) climate change, possibly due to a meteor impact; or, 3) a combination."
    Hansen-Sanders says the exhibit took about four years "from the idea to get the higher-ups to approve to developing it, to designing and building it." She adds, "We're thrilled. It's exactly what we want." The achingly detailed real-size replicas were built in Minnesota and took teams from six months to a year to complete. If you stand under them or near them, you can't help but wonder "What if I had to confront this?"
    "We want visitors to have a sense of awe," says Hansen-Sanders. "Because mammoths and mastodons overlap with human beings, this would have been a real confrontation. What must it have been like to share the landscape with these animals? And they were hunting with spears, for crying out loud. It takes incredible bravery and guts. Of course if you're hungry enough it's worthwhile."
    How would we cope? "Most of us effete suburban dwellers would not be prepared to live in the woods," says Dewar, with a laugh. "I'd want to have a hand grenade. We are so far from our food, from where many wild animals are, where amazing things that are alive today are. It's a juvenile response we get when we're face-to-face (with these live-size replicas) and we don't lose that (as adults)."
    The exhibit is designed to appeal to adults and kids who are in the fourth grade and up, says Hansen-Sanders. Some of the items are touchable. (Lyuba has some fur on her.) There are animated displays, a hands-on lever which you can activate to see how a tusk grows, and an interactive 3D guided tour through the world of cave art.
    "We try to strike that balance of entertainment and science," Hansen-Sanders says. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. I've done it for 15 years, and I learn something new with every exhibit. What do visitors retain of the written descriptions? Ninety words vs. 100 words? You add video or interactive components and that makes it more accessible for kids. You've got the specimens, the tusks and teeth, and then you look what you have available to augment that in ways that will speak to your audience. So we have a little cartoon mammoth (in an explanatory video)."
    "Paleontology is a gateway drug for science," Dewar adds. "It's like learning about space, getting a vision of this world that's so different from this plain old world we're used to seeing. We would recognize the world these animals and people like us lived in 15,000 years ago. But we don't think about what it would be like to see a herd of mammoths by the highway."
    At the end of the exhibit, you'll find a segment on elephants, an endangered species and cousins to the mammoths and mastodons. They're all part of the proboscidean family. "Since elephants are still around, it makes this accessible," says Hansen-Sanders, "but the mammoths and mastodons are long enough away so that it's mesmerizing, and creates a great sense of wonder."
    Near the end, you'll come across five containers. On the top of the containers are neat piles of fake dung. Your job? Guess which animal deposited which mound.
    "They're sure crowd pleasers," says Hansen-Sanders. "Our replication shop made that in-house. It was a lot of fun to do. We were lucky enough to get two samples of the mammoth poop. And kids love the dung."
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