You can’t go wrong with dinosaurs. This, at least, is what the Royal Ontario Museum is hoping as they prepare for two new exhibits: “Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight” and “The Bird Connection,” which opened March 12 and will run all summer.

The centrepieces of the first exhibit are 34 exceptional 125-million-year-old fossils of feathered dinosaurs and other animals that were discovered in the fossil beds of the province of Liaoning in China. The second exhibit, “The Bird Connection,” draws on the ROM’s own fossil and bird collection (much of which is currently off display as the ROM undergoes renovation) to explain how scientists determined the evolution of flightless dinosaurs into flying birds.

As visitors enter the first exhibit, they walk past a life-sized model of the forbidding, feathered four-metre-tall Therizinosaurus, which (despite its massive claws) was a plant eater. Beside him are three members of the infamous raptor family, which scientists now believe had feathers rather than scales. There are two sets of models here, an old version with scales and a new one with feathers.

The exhibit is an interesting mix of science and scientific context. It opens with early sketches of various bird-like dinosaurs and a brief discussion of the debate about the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, which is the exhibit’s theme, one that is not definitively answered.

The fossils from China are put into historical and evolutionary context with posterboards. As well as the feathered dinosaurs, there are fossils of small reptiles and fish, which shed light on the rest of the ancient ecosystem.

Large pictures of various fossils under ultraviolet light or x-rays reveal interesting features of the fossils not visible to the naked eye. For example, UV light shone on one of the fossils shows the holes where feathers would have been.

The centrepieces of the exhibit, however, are the skeletons of feathered dinosaurs, some of which had proper flight feathers that allowed them to fly. The fossils are extraordinary in their detail-many still have their feathers.

Of these flightless dinosaurs, the most interesting is possibly Shenzouraptor, a bird that lived 125 million years ago-50 million years after the most famous feathered dinosaur, Archaeopteryx. The fossil, which is on display for the first time in North America, shows the evolution from Archaeopteryx to modern bird. Archaeopteryx had claws on the ends of its wings and was not a very good flyer. Shenzouraptor lost its claws, like a bird, but still had a long tail and a few teeth, unlike a bird, making it a sort of missing link in the evolution from ancient to modern birds.

After Shenzouraptor comes a detailed display of feathered and flightless dinosaurs, which is where I became confused. The trouble is that while the exhibit purports to be demonstrating the link between birds and dinosaurs, the posterboards do not do a good job of explaining the criteria for distinguishing between the two.

My traditional view (based on the dino books I read as a youngster) was that dinosaurs were large, featherless, and cold-blooded. Here the curators define any reptile that could fly as a primitive bird, and only vaguely explain why. Adding to the confusion, the curators define the flightless animals that evolved from these animals as birds-but reptiles that had feathers but didn’t have ancestors that flew are called dinosaurs. The tacit assumption seems to be that dinosaurs and birds evolved entirely independently.

I addressed my confusion to Dr. Gerry De Iuliis, a zoology professor at U of T and the curator of the second exhibit, “The Bird Connection.” He explained that the generally accepted theory among palaeontologists is that birds are a type of dinosaur, just like whales are a type of mammal. His exhibit explains how modern biology links animals with matching traits together and tracks their evolution.

In the press release for the exhibit De Iuliis calls the Chinese fossils “a marvelous transition series,” which confirm the evolution from dinosaur into bird. “In this instance,” he says, “one fossil locality virtually fills in the gap between non-bird and bird.”

However, the evolution from dinosaur to bird is not without controversy, and the curators who designed the first exhibit retain the old view that dinosaurs and birds evolved independently from a common ancestor around 250 million years ago.

After going through the first exhibit, reading the posterboards and looking at all the fossils, I admit that my attention started to flag. The second exhibit is a long look at the evolution of various traits through time, which is interesting but slightly overwhelming-particularly after coming through another long exhibit. And while it is exciting to see controversy in modern science, without talking to De Iuliis the conflicting information from the two exhibits would have been frustrating rather than interesting.

All in all, though, the presentation is effective and engaging, and the fossils rare and exciting enough to warrant a visit.