Life as a 60-foot-long Mamenchisaurus was no small feat. Check out how an average human would size up next to one of these super-sized sauropods that once roamed the Earth and visit The World’s Largest Dinosaurs site for more details about the upcoming exhibition.

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A pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur known as Microraptor had black iridescent feathers when it roamed the Earth 130 million years ago, according to new research led by a team of American and Chinese scientists that includes Museum researchers. The dinosaur’s fossilized plumage is the earliest record of iridescent feather color. The findings, which suggest the importance of display in the early evolution of feathers, are published in the March 9 edition of the journal Science.

“This study gives us an unprecedented glimpse at what this animal looked like when it was alive,” said Mark Norell, one of the paper’s authors and chair of the Museum’s Division of Paleontology.

In 1950, the Museum’s Hayden Planetarium began accepting reservations for the first trip into space as part of a publicity campaign for its exhibition Conquest of Space. Letters poured in from around the world with requests to book trips to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and beyond, capturing the public’s passion and curiosity for space exploration. One cosmic hopeful suggested surveying Earth’s planetary neighbor for ancient life.

Though interplanetary tourism is not yet possible, our fascination with space travel persists. Discover what the future holds for space exploration in the Museum’s exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration. To see more of the Hayden letters and tell us where in space you’d like to go today, click here. And if you share Arthur’s interest in dinosaurs, stop by The World’s Largest Dinosaurs before it closes on Monday, January 2.

In a corner of the exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, an elegant wire outline of the head of Diplodocus longus, a sauropod that lived in the Late Jurassic period about 156 million years ago, anchors a fascinating fossil: one half of a bony braincase, its interior carefully color-coded to denote various functional structures once within it.

This specimen from the Museum’s paleontology collection is a single dinosaur toe covered with lichen.

Most likely collected in 1912 in Alberta, Canada, the toe is thought to belong to a hadrosaur (duck-billed) or ceratopsian (horned) dinosaur. The toe is the terminal phalanx, or the one that supported the hoof. The lichen growth, which occurred on the two damaged parts of the bone, shows that the bone was exposed on the surface of the ground for many years before being discovered.