When I heard that the American Museum of Natural History had released a free app for iPhone and iPod Touch based on their phenomenal dinosaur fossil halls, I could hardly wait to try it out. The museum advertised it as a way to “explore the fossil halls in depth,” and I was eager to see how they would translate their information-rich exhibits of significant fossils collected over the past century to an interactive hand-held format. Maybe my expectations were too high. Dinosaurs is beautiful to look at, but there’s not much substance under its visually arresting skin.
The application opens with a photograph of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull, which dissolves into an ingenious photographic mosaic of the image. Color photographs make up the skull itself, set against a lighter background made of black and white drawings and photos from the museum’s archives. Tapping the mosaic image lets you zoom in to see individual photographs, and an “info” button lets you display a more detailed description of each picture. A “Stories” button at the bottom of the screen brings up a list of 6 specific dinosaur fossils in the museum’s collection. Tapping each of these fossil images brings up a nice illustrated article by Lowell Dingus describing how the fossil was collected and what the animal was like in life. Barring updates, those are the only six dinosaurs you’re really going to learn about in depth – the photo mosaic contains over 800 images, but the descriptions attached to each of them are no more than a couple of lines long. What’s worse, there’s no indexing or search function, making it tough to re-find specific pictures.
It’s very pretty but frankly, I found it disappointing. The mosaic is a lovely opening screen, but the fact that it makes up most of the program seems to me to be a missed opportunity. Wouldn’t it be better if the mosaic photos were jumping off points for more in-depth explorations? What if clicking on a photo of a Triceratops skull showed you how that species fit in the tree of dinosaur relationships? Or clicking the photo of the famous Oviraptor fossil on its nest opened a discussion of what’s known about parental care in dinosaurs? Or clicking the archival photos of Barnum Brown or Roy Chapman Andrews opened their biographies or their field notebooks? The science and history of paleontology is incredibly rich: I hope that future updates of the app take better advantage of it.
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