"Walking with Dinosaurs," explain of smoke, sounds, light and striking music with a 42-foot-long T. rex and nine added mobile dinosaurs, will make its SoCal debut with 10 shows at the Honda Center starting Wednesday. A seven-show run is scheduled to run at Staples Center from Sept. 25-27.

The Times' Mike Boehm offers us a sneak peek in today's Calendar part: At the controls are a driver at the bottom of all creature, and two-member teams of high-tech puppeteers stationed in a booth high on top of the floor. Five smaller carnivores that round out the cast are populated by realistically dinosaur-suited actors, who have no aim of being confused with Barney.

For natural olden time’s museums, it may be somewhat discomfiting to have traditional displays of fossilized remains potentially upstaged by wholly fleshed-out facsimiles that make a lot more than just stand there. The William Brown, president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia said that "I'm confident some rational-thinking scientists think it's a bad thing”. But he is happy to make out an "edutainment" sight like "Walking With Dinosaurs" pack families into sports arenas for staged lessons in evolutionary biology. Perhaps the Rolling Stones can at present quake off their own dinosaur label when it comes to their incessant arena touring.

Source: latimesblogs.latimes.com