New Haven Independent

Visitors perusing the halls of bones got a nice surprise this week, finding the fluffy newborns waddling around in a glass case in the big dinosaur room.

Peter Hastings, another museum attendant, has been watching all along. First the eggs started to twitch in the incubator. Then the birds, curled up inside, started to chirp back at the sound of a human whistle. Last week they hatched. The first one emerged on Wednesday. It took three hours to peck its way out of the thick shell, then slumped down in fatigue. Three others followed later that week.

“They were exhausted from hatching and their eyes were closed,” recalled museum attendant Pasquale Calamita. Visitors gathered ‘round. “Excuse the pun, but they flocked in.” The last one, on Friday, got stuck to the shell. Staff worried he wouldn’t make it. But all four newborns hopped, pecked and peeped in a glass case Monday. They ran up to the window when visitors stopped by to gush over them. “I could watch them all day,” said Calamita. Sometimes, “almost like an invisible signal — they all come together and lie down in a group.”

Two eggs — staff weren’t sure if they’d make it — remained unhatched Monday. The newborns, about 10 inches tall, stumbled around the mesh floor, plopping down on the ground suddenly and colliding into each other. They can grow up to six feet tall and reach amazing speeds on foot: up to 40 miles per hour in short sprints. Flightless birds related to the ostrich, they “roamed the (Australian) outback some 80 million years ago,” according to the museum.

The Peabody doesn’t usually have live animals hopping around in its displays. But when working on an exhibit called “Hatching the Past,” about dinosaur eggs and nests, staff got the idea: “Wouldn’t it be cool to hatch something here?” explained Dave Heiser, the museum’s event coordinator. Yale paleontologists, and most in the field, say birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. Birds evolved from duck-like avian dinosaurs who escaped mass extinction, said Heiser. Hatching an exotic, “modern-day dinosaur” would bring relevance, and excitement, to the famous rooms of looming dinosaur skeletons.

The emus were such a hit two years ago that the museum repeated the show.

Emus are scheduled to return to their place of origin today: the Songline Emu Farm in Gill, Mass. Museum staff, who’d come to know the animals, were sad to report they’d meet the same end as other emus on the farm, harvested for emu meat, and emu oil, which is rich in Omega 3 and is sold in dietary supplements, dog shampoo and Emu Goat Milk Bar Soaps, according to the farm’s website.