“Leave it as at is,” Theodore Roosevelt once said about the wonders of the Precambrian: “The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”

What a scandal that the institution co-founded by his father—and with Teddy Roosevelt's own outlandish equestrian statue out front, flanked by Red Indians—would prove the great man so pitifully right about history. (And in 2011, no less: the centennial of his legendary Bull Moose break from the Republican Party.)

The World’s Largest Dinosaurs—which opened at the American Museum of Natural History on April 16th and plays (if that can be the word for this inert, child-sneering exhibit) through the year—purports to [...]