Stony Brook exhibit aims to 'humanize' its hospital

Starting Tuesday, visitors entering the lobby of Stony Brook University Medical Center will be face-to-face with a crocodile.

And not just any crocodile: This one, though just 2 1/2 feet long, has a super-tough armored skin and it's been dead for 65 million years. It's a life-size model.

The hospital, in an attempt to "humanize" its public areas, is turning to animals - albeit ones that have been extinct since the Late Cretaceous era. The exhibit, next to the visitor's desk, features fossils and plaster castings of skeletons of the crocodile, a giant frog and a meat-eating dinosaur.

"Patients and visitors in hospitals have a lot of downtime, and this will be a welcome distraction," said Professor David Krause, a paleontologist and professor of anatomical sciences at the university who spent yesterday installing some of his favorite finds from 17 years of combing through the earth in Madagascar.

Krause and graduate students have brought back a "mother lode" of Cretaceous creatures from the former French colony off Africa since the days when he wondered if he would find a single fossil. His favorites in the exhibit include a 21-foot-long, meat-eating dinosaur named Majungasaurus crenatissimus, with short powerful hind legs and smaller front legs, and jaws lined with spiky teeth that could cut through flesh.

The scientists found an entire skull of the dinosaur in 1996 in what Krause calls one of the best moments of his life. "I was yelling in French," he said, "and I don't even speak French."

Another favorite on exhibit is a predator with a long neck and long arms that Krause named Masiakasaurus knopfleri, after Mark Knopfler, lead singer of Dire Straits, whose recordings often provided the background music for 12-hour days of digging.

Then there's what Krause calls the "frog from hell," a 10-pounder whose discovery was celebrated by National Geographic as the second-most significant fossil discovery of 1988.

The exhibit will complement paintings by local artists and a donated piano, said Steven Strongwater, chief executive of the medical center. "We're really good at the technological side of healing," he said, "but we have not always been so good at the human side."