Pterodactyls Buzz St. Louis Community College

Studying dinosaur fossils can be hard work, but imagine building a dinosaur from scratch. That was the task given to St. Louis Community College art student Nicki Conaway, who created a 12-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus skeleton (nicknamed "Lola") for a production of the play Pterodactyls at her school. The sculpture was mostly constructed of Styrofoam.

​Don't be deceived by the title of the play, though. You won't see people in pterosaur costumes running about the stage. Instead Pterodactyls (which ran last month) was a black comedy about a dysfunctional family. The Tyrannosaurus comes in when one of the characters finds its bones in the backyard and is more interested in putting them together than in paying attention to the rest of the family. I'm sure it was an interesting performance, but I would have loved to have seen an all-pterosaur cast.

Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.