'Dinosaurs Unleashed' In Convention Center Exhibit

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- It's a well known fact that kids are fascinated by dinosaurs. And the youngsters who visited an exhibit at David L. Lawrence Convention Center Friday afternoon are no exception.

They couldn't wait to enter a world they've only seen in movies. It's a weekend exhibit called "Discover the Dinosaurs Unleashed."

The 20-ton Apatosaurus is the biggest of them all. A baby of the breed is represented in a cuddly puppet, manipulated to the delight of children by "paleontologist" Meghan Edwards.

"Kids love dinosaurs," she says. "They're big and exciting. It's like a giant lizard, so that's cool. And I think also, for a lot of people, kids included, there's just a lot of mystery to it.

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"There's so much we don't know. We're still learning."

The exhibit contains 18 dinosaurs. Herbivores are nice, but Tyrannosaurus Rex towers over all. But a baby T-Rex helps to put kids at ease.

"She's a smaller, gentler breed of everything we have here, so it does help, yeah," Meghan Edwards says.

Mama Triceratops attends to her offspring. Stegosaurus does the same. Despite their size, voracious Velociraptors have the edge in a death match with Iguanodon.

Seeing the dinosaurs is very exciting, but working a sluice like this - they call it the fossil find - can be a slow and tedious process. But organizers make sure the searchers find something. To many kids, the dinosaurs are real.

"Yeah, I love that," the "paleontologist" says. "And I'm not going to tell them they're not."