Looking at dinosaurs -- from the inside out

The anatomy of super-size dinosaurs, sauropods -- from their guts to their skin -- will be on display in a new American Museum of Natural History exhibition: "The World's Largest Dinosaurs."

Opening Saturday, the exhibition features a life-size, 60-foot-long sauropod assembled by "Jurassic Park" production designer Hal Train, 54, of Toronto, and his team of artists.

It took the team about a year to mold the dinosaur, affectionately named Little Foot, from fiberglass used to build jet planes.

Train says he has been interested in dinosaurs since he was a kid and he hopes their great mystery is never solved.

"We'll never know how they exactly looked like. But it's a wonderful exercise to infer into a mystery that we will not be able to completely solve. I don't want it to be solved definitively. Then the debate will end and people will lose interest," said Train, who has worked on documentaries about prehistoric life.

The dinosaur model shows the different layers of its body -- its muscles, organs and bones. It pulsates to demonstrate how it breathed, ate and digested its food, and how it hatched eggs. "This is the first time it's been done at such levels of completeness," Train said.

The exhibition also has hands-on activities, including a hand pump that demonstrates how much pressure was needed to pump blood from the sauropod's long neck to its head.

The exhibition, which sheds light on how dinosaurs were living animals and compares them to their closest relatives, including birds and crocodiles, runs from Saturday to Jan. 2 of next year.