DINOMAN comes to the County!

     Elementary school students in Fort Fairfield, Houlton, and Monticello had a rare treat last week as DINOMAN came visiting.  DINOMAN, whose real name is Bob Lisaius of Warren, Vermont, travels throughout the school year giving performances to help students understand more about dinosaurs and perhaps themselves.  His summers, with “my lovely wife and our three children” are spent in Wyoming, digging for dinosaurs.

     His show lasts about 40 minutes, beginning with a paleontologist (DINOMAN) following enormous dinosaur footprints right to the students gathered in the Fort Fairfield Elementary School cafetorium.  Some of the questions asked and answered in the show include how we know dinosaurs were here, how did they live and how do we know all this!

     The show also answers the questions what is a fossil and how is it made.  A vicious stuffed toy raccoon leaps from a bag and attacks DINOMAN, but he is able to subdue it and bury it in a box of dirt.  He then reaches into the dirt and hauls out a raccoon skeleton, showing the students how fossils are created.

     DINOMAN carries a bag of bones as well.  A triceratops spine fragment is useful in showing students how the spine works and he tells them to reach around and feel their own spines to see similarities.  He also had some vicious looking talons from other dinosaurs, and a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex skull.  In showing the skull, DINOMAN remarked that a baby T-Rex would have to eat one student per day to stay healthy.  This caused some oohs and aaahs from the audience as students considered themselves lucky that a baby T-Rex wasn’t around.

     At one point, demonstrating predator behavior, DINOMAN screamed in a scary, Jurassic Park manner; this amused all the students watching!  He asked, “What’s the most important thing to bring if you go looking for a real live T-Rex?”  No one knew.  The answer was, “A slower friend.”

     Finally DINOMAN asks if the students would like to see a dinosaur.  The answer is a resounding YES, and he walks to a harmless looking gray pile in the corner.  The gray pile grows and grows and – wow! – a life-size triceratops!  The triceratops, DINOMAN tells the students, has the largest skull of any animal ever to live.  The largest animal ever to live is the blue whale now swimming in Earth’s oceans, but the triceratops had a bigger skull than even the blue whale. 

     Taller than triceratops is lambeosaurus, a dinosaur with a large bone protruding from the back of its head.  Lambeosaurus was taking a nap in DINOMAN’s tent, but she, too, grew to astounding size to the delighted screams of students.

     Finally there was giganticasasaurus, a species only recently discovered.  Giganticasasaurus was discovered in Argentina, where dinosaur digging has started to become more widespread.  DINOMAN explained that most dinosaur fossils were discovered in the United States as “we had the most money to devote to finding them,” but now other countries are finding resources and are enthusiastically digging for fossils. Giganticasasaurus is the largest named meat-eater we know about.  There are two others, but they are so new they have not even been named yet.

     Prior to the show at Fort Fairfield Elementary School, DINOMAN visited individual classrooms with a number of fossils students can pass around and touch, including bugs in amber, petrified wood and real dinosaur bones.  The mini-workshops allow students a closer look and the opportunity to ask questions in a more controlled environment than the big show.

     The three dinosaurs are made by George York of Portland, Maine, who creates them from hot-air balloon material. Lisaius tells him what species he wants, and York does the research and designs the balloon.  The balloons are inflated by a small fan and uninflated by means of a zipper in the belly. Lisaius’s company, Icefire, owns seven dinosaur balloons, one of which is a giant dinosaur people can walk into and examine internal organs.  That one is on tour in California at the present.

     Lisaius holds two bachelor degrees; one is in theater and the other is in telecommunications.  He has no science degree and says that there are only 82 paleontologists in the world, all of whom are connected to a university.  There are thousands of enthusiastic self-learners, like himself, who love to go dig up dinosaur fossils.

     “I started out collecting rocks as a kid in New Jersey,” he said.  When he was about 10, he started digging around trying to find dinosaur bones and has been at it ever since.  The school year shows provide the funding necessary to take the summer off and go to Wyoming.  A landowner in Wyoming allows the family to dig on his property.

     The Fort Fairfield PTO made the visit to Fort Fairfield Elementary School possible by donating funds.  After each of the two shows, for grades K-2 and 3-5, students were loud in their praises.  “It was a great show,”  “This is the best show I’ve ever seen,”  “I learned a lot I didn’t know before,” and many remarks about their favorite parts were some of the comments.