Barry the dinosaur was being put through his paces last week. Over and over, he would rear up on his massive hind legs, bare rows of needle-sharp teeth, and then pounce at the robot fish slithering across his plywood plinth. Then the huge creature - baryonyx, or Barry, to staff at the Natural History Museum - would return to his starting position and begin his hunt again.
In the background, a dozen other life-sized animatronic reptiles were howling, disembowelling prey and snarling at each other. A pony-sized coelophysis dangled a tiny baby dino in his jaws, while dog-like velociraptors munched on the carcass of a headless baby protoceratops.
The display - being tested in advance of the museum's Dino Jaws exhibition - is set to become one of the capital's major tourist attractions this summer. 'It is very dramatic, and shows what a profound change there has been in this technology,' said John Phillips, the museum's senior mechanical engineer.
'The first animatronic dinosaurs, built in the Nineties, could move their heads and blink and not much more. These can twist and turn, move their eyes and do all sorts of complex movements. In another 10 years, they will no longer be stuck on plinths either. We will have a tyrannosaurus wandering round the museum.'
Dinosaur robotics is set to make considerable sums for the museum - and its Japanese partner, the robot manufacturer Kokoro. Once it has finished its run at the museum next year, Dino Jaws will tour Europe for several years. Staff from the museum and Kokoro are also collaborating on a robot dinosaur park in Dubai. More than 100 raptors, stegosauruses, triceratops and iguanodons will soon strut their stuff by the Gulf for tourists.
'We are getting very close to the world of Jurassic Park,' said exhibition curator Emma Freeman. 'However, this one is going to be one re-created in metal and plastic. There will no clones'.
Nor is this revolution restricted to technology. Palaeontology has also made dramatic progress in recent years, as the museum's chief dinosaur expert, Angela Milner, explained. 'There have been recent discoveries, mostly in China, of dinosaurs that clearly had feathers, which have given us a new understanding about evolution,' she said.
Scientists now believe that an early, arboreal species of dinosaur evolved feathers, initially to keep warm, and then found that these helped them glide from tree to tree to escape predators. This lineage became the source of all birds found on Earth today. Nor is this rate of progress diminishing. Forty per cent of all known dinosaur species were uncovered in the past two decades. 'Far from running out of new creatures, we are finding more and more,' added Milner.
A perfect example is Barry, destined to be the star of Dino Jaws. Discovered in 1983 in a gravel pit near Dorking, Surrey and reconstructed by a team led by Milner, this fish-eating monster - baryonyx translates as 'big claw' - was the first carnivorous dinosaur found in England. Its long rows of teeth were startlingly similar to those of an alligator.
'Some of my colleagues said I had got it wrong when I reconstructed baryonyx,' added Milner. 'They said I had found remains of an ancient alligator. In fact, I found that teeth in the museum archives that had labelled as belonging to alligators belonged to baryonyx.'
· The term 'dinosaur' was invented by Sir Richard Owen in 1842 and comes from the Greek deinos (terrible) and sauros (lizard).
· Dinosaurs lived from the late Triassic period (about 225 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous era (about 65 million years ago).
· The world's largest dinosaur was argentinasaurus. It was more than 120ft long and weighed up to 100 tons.
· The world's smallest dinosaur footprint - the same size as a 5p piece - was found on the Isle of Skye in 2004.
· Dinosaurs of rock include T. Rex, Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs, and the single 'Brontosaurus', by The Move.