Plantosaurus: The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park spotlights ancient plants along with some extinct fauna, left.
Yes, that’s a Tyrannosaurus rex head poking out of the Conservatory of Flowers roof. No, there aren’t hallucinogens in the Golden Gate Park fog. The beast is part of “Plantosaurus Rex,” a new exhibition of ancient plants that runs through Oct. 21.
“I was a huge dinosaur nerd as a kid,” admitted Director of Operations and Exhibitions Lau Hodges, who put the display together and
wrote its explanatory booklet. “It was a dream come true, a chance to show a lot of plants we don’t often display.”
She wanted to tell a story of adaptation, how plants responded to the planet’s changing geography and climate and how they co-evolved with animals.
She wanted to engage young visitors, combining lifelike (and sometimes life-size) dinosaur sculptures by Sonoma County artist Bridget Keimel with modern relatives of ancient plants. The show is tied together by Saxon Holt’s gorgeous, evocative photomurals.
“Lau told me she wanted a T. rex busting through the roof,” Keimel said. “It’s pretty much a composite. I found a plastic model at a toy store that had the right position and used it as my basis, throwing in ideas from other artists’ work.”
Although some paleontologists believe tyrannosaurs may have had feathers, Keimel’s has the traditional scaly hide: “We wanted a texture that would hold up to the humidity, and it would be a lot more time-consuming to have feathers.”
A long, long time ago
The conservatory’s time trip begins 250 million years ago in the Triassic Period of the Mesozoic Era, when life on Earth was recovering from the mother of all mass extinctions at the end of the Permian.
Opportunistic plants like ferns and horsetails — still the first to come back after volcanic eruptions and other upheavals — recolonized the barren supercontinent of Pangaea. The dinosaurs were just getting started, vying for supremacy with older reptile lineages.
Then comes the Jurassic, the Mesozoic period with the most name recognition (although most of the dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” movies were in fact Cretaceous species).
As tectonic forces tore Pangaea apart, trees spread over the landscape: conifers, ginkgoes, the ancient palmlike cycads. They fed the giant sauropods, the largest land animals that ever lived, whose flatulence (not reproduced in the exhibition) may have included enough methane to influence the climate.
While there was no room in the conservatory for a supersaurus or ultrasaurus, Keimel created a 7-foot-long baby stegosaurus and a menacing adult allosaurus for this part of the exhibition. The reptiles that conquered the air are represented by a bat-like pterosaur the size of an eagle.
Hodges said she rounded up 30 cycad species from the conservatory’s collection for the Jurassic. The conifers were harder: “They’re not something a tropical greenhouse has.” Some came from the Golden Gate Park nursery, and Sunborn Nursery found an impressive monkey puzzle tree.
A predatory period
T. rex and its predatory kin dominated the final period of the Mesozoic, the Cretaceous, along with new dynasties of horned and duckbilled dinosaurs and an array of feathered “dinobirds.”
The plantscape changed too: flowering plants, whose origin was “an abominable mystery” to Charles Darwin, appeared. The exhibition includes basal forms like magnolias and water lilies alongside later arrivals such as grasses and orchids.
This is when the partnership between plants and their insect pollinators began. The co-existence of orchids and dinosaurs was recently established by the discovery of orchid pollen on the back of a bee entombed in 80 million-year-old Dominican amber.
Two live red-eared slider turtles, whose kind saw the dinosaurs rise and fall, preside over the Cretaceous garden. Hodges told us they were moved from the conservatory’s aquatic room, where they had been snacking on Amazon water lilies. Now they have water hyacinths to snack on: “They’re opportunivores,” Hodges explained.
Go back in time
Sound artist Andrew Roth, a longtime collaborator with the conservatory, gave voices to the dinosaurs. “It was too hard to build a time machine in time for the exhibit,” he told us.
“The ambient soundscapes are things I recorded in Bali, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Japan. It was interesting smooshing them together into one room. T. rex combines lion, tiger, walrus and slowed-down badger, with a subwoofer to help him sound mean.” Roth used lizard and snake sounds for the allosaurus, and eagle and vulture calls for the pterosaur.
Visitors can push buttons to hear the dinosaurs or activate a miniature volcano’s quaking rumble via the “ButtKicker 2,” invented for scary park rides.
“We wanted plants that visiting kids can have a relationship with,” Hodges said. “They can look at a gingko and say, ‘The tree in front of my house is dinosaur food.’ ”
They might also think of their small furry nocturnal ancestors, cowering in the gingko while T. rex crashed through the Mesozoic forest.