英语听力：恐龙是怎样炼成的—24

Back in Los Angeles, last-minute preparations are under way to get the dinosaurs ready for the public. It's only now that you get a sense of just how many people have been involved in creating this exhibition, from the artists to the designers, to the teams that made the interactive media and mounts for the dinosaurs, all of it bring into life of decades of research that our current scientific understanding relies on.

The exhibition consists of over 300 specimens. It's taken more than six years to complete and cost tens of millions of dollars.

We've created an exhibit that this part of the world has never seen. And it's very rewarding for me to think about the millions of kids and the millions of people that during the next twenty years will visit this exhibit and will remember this exhibit for the rest of their lives.

These animals look like something out of a comic book or a Hollywood studio, but they were real. From a pile of dusty bones millions of years old, we can put a skeleton back together, flesh it out, tell what colour there creatures were and even say something about how they grew up.

I think this is a unique time to be a dinosaur paleontologist. We are finding so much, discovering new dinosaurs and learning new things about them.

There are certainly still gaps in our knowledge, but I find it amazing just how much we do know about there extinct animals that no one has ever actually seen alive and that lived so many millions of years ago. The creatures themselves are utterly all inspiring. But I think so is the incredible amount of work and vast numbers of people involved in reconstructing them so that we can come face to face with a dinosaur.