Extreme mammals arrive at Fernbank

Briefly swallowed by a model of the Indricotherium, the largest mammal that ever walked the earth, Chisler was helping assemble the dramatic monster in a downstairs gallery of the Fernbank Museum of Natural History."It takes two people, one inside and one outside, to bolt the panels on," said Chisler. "They are actually rather light."Though life-size, the model is constructed of lightweight (and translucent) fiberglass panels,Amusement Park Equipment-Garden Decoration, hung on a wood-and-steel armature, but at 15 feet tall and 21 feet long, the real McCoy was a hefty vegetarian, weighing in at 20 to 30 tons.

Meticulously constructed — each eyelash was fletched by hand — the model is also a dramatic sight. It soars nearly to the ceiling of the first gallery to house a new show called "Extreme Mammals," a collection of models, fossils and stuffed specimens on loan from the American Museum of Natural History.Fernbank's exhibit tells the mind-boggling story of the birth and evolution of this class of warm-blooded animals and the bewildering diversity within it, from the 21-foot Indricotherium, a rhino-like creature,Carnival Equipment-Pleasure Boat, to the 1 1/2-inch Batodonoides, an extinct relative of the shrew and the smallest mammal known.

(The diminutive prehistoric shrew was discovered when a scientist, examining fossil remains under a microscope, realized that he was probably looking at tiny, tiny teeth.)There are some significant fossils and casts of fossils in the collection. One of these is a copy of Ida, a 47 million-year-old lemur-like anthropoid discovered in Germany that is the earliest known animal with an opposable thumb and perhaps is the missing link between humans and more primitive primates.