Walk right in

aLL this week in the Bishopthorpe Pageant Dr Phil Manning has been playing the "most unpopular man in York", the dubious honour bestowed upon Henry IV after he ordered the execution of the Archbishop of York, Richard le Scrope.

However, from today, Dr Manning is sure to be a very popular man in York. As Keeper of Geology at the Yorkshire Museum, he has been the key player in mounting the museum's new exhibition Walking With Dinosaurs - and wherever dinosaurs walk, York audiences gather.

So busy has Dr Manning been - together with the museum curator Paul Howard and his staff as they prepare for today's opening - that each pageant night he has had to do his Henry IV turn then return immediately to dinosaur duties.

Any tiredness could be excused, and yet his boundless enthusiasm for dinosaur research over-rides any feelings of sleep deprivation. He apologises for the clutter of files, academic books, papers and dinosaur debris in his office, and for his temporary Henry IV beard ("My wife wants it to be very, very temporary" he jokes), and then launches into an explanation of why the dinosaurs have returned to the Yorkshire Museum so soon after the Jurassic show left town.

"People forget that the Yorkshire Museum has one of the finest geology collections in the world, and certainly in Europe, including marine reptiles that are unique to the East Coast," he says.

This exhibition, mounted in association with BBC Worldwide, gives the Yorkshire Museum the chance to show off some its geological treasures and fossils in tandem with replicas of huge dinosaur heads. On display too are models - or more precisely maquettes - used in Walking With Dinosaurs, the BBC natural history series that drew 19 million people a week, plus models newly made by Peter Minster, of Manchester, and based on the series' computer-generated dino-stars.

Look out, too, for living creatures, such as giant Madagascan cockroaches and Shirley the Nurse Shark (whose tank glass should not be tapped, a sign advises), and a blue-screen demonstration facility that will allow visitors to put themselves into a dinosaur scene on screen.

Dr Manning knows that dinosaurs are, in the jargon of the advertising industry, very sexy. "If we were to put on an exhibition called The Petrology of Yorkshire, people would be bored by the idea. You don't have to have a headline title every time, but it helps that 'dinosaur' is such a wonderful sledgehammer with which to crack open the nut! Children love them, adults love them, or as I say, children of all ages love them, and before you know it, through dinosaur exhibitions people know more about geology... geography... zoology... biology... and plate tectonics."

Should anyone be thinking "Oh no, not dinosaurs again", Dr Manning says Walking With Dinosaurs is an exhibition of a different scale and magnitude to Jurassic.

"You will see the models from the show; you will see footage on how they put the series together; you will see giant high-resolution images made by EPS of Leeds from the series, and you will see real fossils and fantastic cast material from all over the world, to show some of the science behind the show.

"That series broke all barriers of past natural history programmes, and it was cutting-edge science. Tim Haynes reinvented the natural history show with Walking With Dinosaurs: he made the first natural pre-history programme."

The world of the dinosaur discovery is moving on apace, according to Dr Manning. "Hopefully like my lectures never being the same, the wonder of science is that it is always changing: it's amazing how much we do not know that we do not know!" he says. "Hindsight is a wonderful thing; we have to go digging for it and once we have found these amazing objects, our job is to interpret."

Warming to his theme, he says: "Through exhibitions we are story tellers, and the most interesting story is the story of life on earth, and this is just one chapter of it.

"I think it was Charles Darwin who said that the history of life is a library, and the more you go back in time, the more the books have not been returned or the copies are frayed, and once you reach the dinosaur section, only disjointed sentences are left. We can't put those disjointed sentences and paragraphs back together completely but we can come up with interesting stories about what life must have been like."

Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, its sequel The Lost World and this year's new American hit Dinosaur may have taken interest in dinosaurs to new heights, but Dr Manning says they have long captured the imagination: "Dinosaurs were first described by Sir Richard Owen in 1842 - so the British invented the dinosaur, and that's very important! - and the public were immediately captivated by them. Prince Albert was fascinated, collecting pieces; dinosaur re-constructions were the big attraction at the Crystal Palace exhibition, and Charles Dickens mentioned them in The Old Curiosity Shop, wondering what they would look like walking up Holborn Road."

Dr Manning believes the public has an insatiable thirst for dinosaurs. "There is no one who will not be awe-struck by these creatures, when they stand by a skull," he says.

Hence the exhibition visit by The Queen and Prince Philip on Thursday.

Walking With Dinosaurs, The Exhibition runs at the Yorkshire Museum, Museum Gardens, York, from today until January 3 2001, and then tours the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow from mid-January to mid-April.

PICTURE: Dr Phil Manning and technician Bob Yates work on a Coelophysis