The first thing that grabs your eyeballs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's newest exhibition is the Bambiraptor.

Such a cute name! And the itty bitty dinosaur looks so adorable you just want to tickle it under the chin.

If you tried that 75 million years ago in Montana, you'd live to regret it, said Dr. Ken Carpenter, the museum's resident dinosaur expert.

The feathered Bambiraptor had a wishbone and was definitely carnivorous. "It was the ultimate in ankle biters," Carpenter said.

This chicken with an anger-management issue is just the first of a flock of revelations about early life on the planet displayed at "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries," open today through Jan. 4. It's like the Discovery Channel on steroids.

The highly interactive traveling exhibit manages to excite adult dino-geeks as thoroughly as the kids attracted by anything involving the biggest celebrity, Tyranosaurus Rex.

What gives this dinosaur exhibit its bite:

Twice the T. Rex

Besides a full-sized (and full-toothed) example looming above visitors, the exhibit features a 6-foot-long mechanical skeleton of T. Rex that walks on a treadmill, the motion reflecting recent fossil studies. Carpenter said the T. Rex's top speed was one of the few accurate details in Jurassic Park. "Some scientists say it may have only been 10 miles per hour. I lean toward 25 mph. I know that anything that big would have outrun me." In its relatively tiny arms, long thought to be useless, scientists have found stress fractures. "They may have used the arms to try and hold prey close to their chests while . . . biting and killing them," he said.

A massive vegetarian

One of the most common fossils in Colorado is the lumbering vegetarian giant Apatosaurus. The first was found near Morrison in the 1800s. A 60-foot-long metallic robo-skeleton shows the animal with its head down, not up in the treetops as in Jurassic Park. "The question was always, 'Could it raise its neck higher than its body to get food, and if it did, how did blood get all the way up there?' " Carpenter said. Three HD screens use computer animation to add bones, veins, muscles and skin to the skeleton to show what the living creature would look like.

An ancient swamp

The exhibit's centerpiece is an amazingly detailed 700-square-foot diorama depicting a swampy 130 million-year-old forest complete with trees, ferns, fish and even insects from Liaoning, China. The area has yielded a wealth of fossils, including dinosaurs thought to be feathered. Several of the avian ancestors shown in flight here are indistinguishable to the eye from modern birds. Other displays consider whether dinosaur extinction was caused by a meteor, a volcano or rising seas, or suggest that sauropods and theropods may have moved in herds. Or maybe, given their possible avian descendents, "a flock. Could it be a gaggle? We don't know," Carpenter said.

Horns, helmets, bones and fossils

A "trophy wall" of various skulls shows their horns, frills and bone-y helmets that had been thought of as weapons. Instead, they may have been the dinosaur equivalent of great hair and teeth. "They probably were used for mating displays or against rivals," Carpenter said. In other displays, kids can measure their height next to the leg bone of a T-Rex relative and operate touch screens that allow them to pick a Colorado-based dinosaur and find out where in the state the fossils are found, and vote for their favorite fossil. Curators expect T. Rex to win by a landslide.

Child's play

The Dinosaur Gulch Dig Site gives kids a taste of a day in the life of a working paleontologist. They carefully uncover "fossils" from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods. In a "work" room they can messily mold their own fossils, using plaster, and take them home. Finally, there's the DinoMart, a powerful child magnet that retails dinosaur-related items.

Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries

* What: Interactive traveling exhibition exploring recent dinosaur discoveries

* Where and when: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily to Jan. 4 (except Dec. 25), Denver Museum of Nature & Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd.

* Cost: General admission: $11; $6 (kids and seniors); IMAX Dinosaurs Alive film only: $8; $6 (kids and seniors); Free days: Oct. 22 and Dec. 7 (Colorado residents only)

* Information: 303-322-7009; dmns.org

* Of note: Dino Discovery Family sleepover, Oct. 25-26

Colorado's hot prehistoric attractions

They say that dinosaurs are extinct, but you wouldn't know it living in Colorado, where, for geological reasons, they are literally all over our backyard.

* The first triceratops discovered anywhere was found in 1887 about a mile from where Invesco Field sits.

* Colorado's designated state fossil is the stegosaurus.

* Parts of a T. Rex were discovered during an excavation in a Littleton subdivision.

* Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison shows dinosaur bones and footprints.

* The largest North American dinosaur trackway is in Comanche National Grasslands near La Junta.

* Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument includes petrified redwood stumps up to 14 feet wide and fossils of insects and plants.

* The famous K-T rock layer, evidence of dust from a giant, extinction-inducing meteor, is visible throughout Colorado, particularly at Raton Pass and near Limon.

* Famed paleontologist Robert Bakker, an adviser on Jurassic Park, taught at the University of Colorado.

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