DINOSAUR MAKER : CANOGA PARK GRANDMOTHER'S EXPERTISE BREATHES NEW LIFE INTO THE ANCIENT BONES OF MASSIVE MEAT-EATING GIGANOTOSAURUS.

Byline: Betty Kwong Daily News Staff Writer

Paleontologists are all set to introduce 150 pounds of sculpted polyester resin to the world - not just any old dinosaur skull, but the biggest meat-eating dinosaur yet found.

Meet Giganotosaurus, a wide-bodied creature with a narrow head that, say its discoverers, probably keeled over dead while it was sipping out of a shallow stream 97 million years ago in a savanna we humans now call Argentina.

Its completed skull - measuring more than 6 feet from nose to nape - provides the basis for a scientific guess that it will overshadow all other carnivorous creatures that crawled the earth before humans came to be. Rebuilding its body will take another eight months.

Already, what little is known about this first-of-its-kind find stirs the imagination.

``It was quite a predator, with teeth like that,'' says Mary Odano, pointing to its daggerlike teeth that extend the length of a grown man's hand.

Odano would know. The 5-foot-2-inch Canoga Park grandmother was responsible for breathing shape and form back into the Giganotosaurus (pronounced JIG-a-no-toe-sore-us), the fragmented and incomplete skull of which was hand-carried from that windswept Argentine desert to her warehouse, in pieces.

Because there is no other known Giganotosaurus to use as comparison, it's anyone's guess whether this giant traveled alone or in herds, how it snagged its prey, even if it was male or female.

That's just as well, says Odano. Her imagination has been filling in the blanks since January, when she took on the massive project.

Deep into the wee hours of the night, alone in the Canoga Park warehouse that houses the fossil reproduction business, Odano cast the molds and massaged the polyester resin compound into place. And she got to know ``Giganoto.''

``With his toothy grin, it looks like he's mocking us,'' Odano says, as she put the final touches on the dinosaur skull earlier this month. ``It looks like he's saying, `What are you doing to me? Making me up here?' ''

She laughed. Then she reconsidered. Maybe Giganoto's got a different message, she says slowly.

``I think it's satisfaction to come to life again.''

Giganoto and Odano share an odd kinship. The dinosaur is the only one of its kind found by paleontologists so far. Odano is almost as rare a specimen among humans.

``There are only three people in the world who can do this as professionally as she does it,'' says Don Lessem, president of Dinosaur Productions, the company taking bids from anyone interested in buying a replica of Giganoto.

Two dinosaur reproduction experts run big shops in Canada. The third pro is Odano.

``The skull was finished in seven months,'' Lessem says. ``This is fast in the dinosaur world. It's often a three-year project.''

But while the paleontologists who get credit for finding Giganoto have nothing but praise for her work, Odano insists her role in this historic paleontological discovery is a minor one.

After all, Odano is quick to say, she's a technician, not a scientist. Never was any good at science. Never really gave it serious thought.

When Odano, 72, was growing up in Lafayette, Ind., laundry was washed by hand, wet firewood meant a cold breakfast, and many women were sent to college with the singular goal of finding a husband.

So, when she met Tosh Odano and fell in love, she set aside her childhood musings about prehistoric fossils to become a full-time mother.

Twenty years and four children later, Mary Odano was browsing through her motor club magazine and stumbled across what sounded like a fun family outing - digging for old bones at Shark's Tooth Hill just northeast of Bakersfield.

The 110-square-mile bone bed, rich with 15 million-year-old fossils has since been closed to the public for the sake of fossil preservation and public health. But back then, any bones found in those grasslands were free for the taking. Folks who ran the attraction even encouraged Odano to learn more about the bones she found by taking them to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

A week later, Odano was volunteering five days a week at the museum. One look at the museum laboratory, where fossils are brought back among the living, was enough to launch in 1966 her 18-year museum career - first as a volunteer, and soon after as a paid staff member.

In that time, she has had a hand in piecing back together some of Earth's oldest inhabitants, including the assembly of what, at the time, was the biggest known Tyrannosaurus rex.

``I thought the T. rex was the chance of a lifetime,'' she says, her face crinkling with delight. ``But here it's happening again!''

It's a matter of making yourself available for miracles, Odano likes to say.

Like astronomy, the field of paleontology is littered with amateurs who stumble upon major finds.

Rodolfo Coria, the Argentine paleontologist and museum director who is heading Giganoto's excavation, likes to tell the story of the farmer who had kept a bag of bones in a plastic grocery bag on a shelf at home. Those bones turned out to be the skeleton of one of the smallest dinosaurs ever found - a creature no bigger than a medium-size dog.

But for every one of those fantastic finds, there will be dozens of cases of steak bones or egg-shaped rocks that someone will insist is the dinosaur find of the century.

``Nine out of 10 times, it's nothing,'' Coria says. ``But sometimes, it's very important.''

Giganotosaurus was one of those rare, important discoveries made by an amateur prospector. A chief mechanic for the local hydroelectric dam was taking his family on a weekend drive across the wind-swept Argentine desert between the Andes Mountains and Buenos Aires in his dune buggy when he stumbled across what he thought might be the leg bone of one of the many plant-eating dinosaurs that had been found in the same area.

``He took us out to the field. By the next week, we started digging. After four days, we recovered part of the limb bones, shoulder bones and some vertebrae from the tail,'' Coria says. ``We realized we were working with a very big theropod, which is very unusual in South America, because meat-eating dinosaurs were very scarce.''

Giganoto's unearthing has sparked the interests of many townspeople, who tend to walk around, these days, with eyes fixed firmly on the ground.

``Now, everybody is looking,'' Odano says of the search for more ancient bones. ``Before, they used to see it and just kick it over.''

Maria Grabino of Plaza Huincul, Argentina, is no exception. The 27-year-old artist and sculptor had no interest in dinosaurs until Coria convinced her to take temporary leave from her job as an art teacher at a local school and travel to Canoga Park to take part in the rebuilding of a giant.

Under the guidance of Odano, Grabino is fast becoming another of the few people in the world who can extrapolate the form of a dinosaur from a few bone fragments.

``I look bones, `Wow,' '' Grabino says in broken English, her eyes widening as if she just uncovered a dinosaur skeleton.

``Before,'' she says, waving her hands dismissively, `` `Eh, the bones.' ''

The transformation - from indifference about dinosaurs to their No. 1 fan - usually doesn't take much, Odano says knowingly. And once you're hooked, there's no turning back.

Those bones Odano found in Shark's Tooth Hill were only her first taste of bigger things to come. It wasn't until she got to work on her first major dinosaur - the Edmontosaurus, a duckbill dinosaur - that she truly understood paleontologists' undying fascination with these ancient animals.

``Here's this huge block, the size of a table. You're scratching away, taking the dirt off. Slowly, this bone starts to appear,'' Odano recalls. ``It's like you're in another world. I didn't want anybody to talk to me. ... I never wanted to go home that day.''

It was ``like an out-of-body experience,'' she says. ``It's just amazing, just to know no other human being has ever seen it until that moment.''

That 65-million-year-old Edmontosaurus that Odano uncovered from its protective plaster casing and prehistoric piece of rock bed is still on display at the Natural History Museum.

``The flesh is not there,'' she says, ``but the bones take on a life of their own. It's exquisite.''

In Odano's hometown, there never was much opportunity to pursue her interest in things prehistoric. She never stepped foot in a museum until she went away to college. The local library wasn't much of a resource either.

``When I was a kid, there wasn't even a decent book (about dinosaurs),'' she says.

So, when her long-held love affair with prehistoric creatures finally blossomed, she seized the opportunity to awaken the imaginations of children.

Five years before she retired from museum work, Odano started reproducing dinosaur teeth and claws for sale in the museum gift shop, a souvenir kids could take home, something to make the untouchable giants tangible.

The sideline task soon turned into a full-time business. Eighteen years after she first discovered the science of paleontology, Odano opened Valley Anatomical Preparations in the Canoga Park warehouse, where she and a small staff reproduce everything from $50 dinosaur footprints to a 42-foot-long prehistoric marine reptile that sells for $33,500.

Giganoto will top that figure as the shop's biggest endeavor yet. Starting price for a full-body replica of the biggest meat-eating dinosaur is $100,000. The first order is destined for a major American museum.

Not bad, for a woman who never thought she was any good at science.

``I used to think, when I was a kid, that I wasn't smart enough to do science,'' she says. ``But that's not true. If it's in your heart's desire, you'll find a place on the ladder for yourself.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Mary and her monster

Canoga Par k grandmother Mary Odano is building a prehistoric giant

(2) What began as a family bone-hunting outing in Bakersfield has led Mary Odano, 72, to reproduce dinosaur bones at Valley Anatomical Preparations in Canoga Park.

(3) One of the few experts on re-creating dinosaur bones, Odano shows off a reproduction of a Utahraptor claw.

(4) Odano, who learned the dinosaur bone-molding craft at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, spends a lot of time making deals on the phone in her warehouse. A full-body replica of the Giganotosaurus sells for $100,000.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News