TRAVEL TALES : PARKED FOR A JURASSIC SLEEP-OVER.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Kids have seen dinosaurs on the hoof and angry in ``Jurassic Park.'' Now, they can bed down with the critters, which will be a lot friendlier this time around.

The Dueling Dinosaurs - skeletons of a tyrannosaurus rex and a triceratops, posed in mock attack - have arrived at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park for permanent display. And on at least two nights this fall, kids and their parents can snuggle in their sleeping bags, listen to scary dinosaur stories and sleep beneath the towering skeletons.

A ``Dino-Snores'' sleep-over for kids ages 5-12, scheduled for Oct. 26, already has filled up, but a Nov. 9 slumber party has been added; names are being placed on a waiting list, and other sleep-overs beneath the dinosaurs may be scheduled to meet demand, said Joan Grasty, the museum's chief of education.

She's not surprised that kids want to spend the night with the big, scary brutes.

``You mention dinosaurs and people swarm - especially the 3- to -11-year-old age group,'' Grasty said. ``The kids are really excited. The parents are really excited, too. At night, the museum takes on a definite aura - the light, the shadows the dinosaurs throw on the wall. It's a little creepy, somehow.''

The dinosaur exhibit - which will be officially unveiled Oct. 26, the day of the first sleep-over - is a combination of real dinosaur bones and casts of bones, said John Harris, the museum's curator and chief curator of paleontology.

``About 15 percent of the t. rex is real and about 60 percent of the triceratops,'' he said. The exhibit is an amalgam of the museum's own dinosaur skulls and other bones, found in the 1960s during excavations in Montana, and casts of more dinosaur bones owned by a Canadian museum. The dinosaurs' skulls - when it was discovered, the t. rex skull was the largest complete skull ever found - were too heavy to be suspended from wires as part of the exhibit.

``They're solid rock and they're very heavy,'' said Harris. ``We could suspend them, but if we had an earthquake, we'd have problems.''

Making the skulls part of the exhibit also would have required drilling damaging holes in them. Instead, casts were made of the skulls to include in the exhibit, and the originals are on display alongside.

The skeletons were assembled in fighting stances - the towering t. rex is preparing to attack the smaller triceratops - in Canada over a four-month period. Taken apart in modules - the t. rex in five pieces, the triceratops in four - they were flown to Los Angeles, where the front doors had to be taken off the museum to get them inside. The skeletons then had to be reassembled; each weighs about 1,500 pounds.

The display takes people aback, even those who have worked on it, because of its size, Harris said.

``The dinosaurs are sort of overwhelming,'' with the exhibit standing nearly the height of a two-story building and 36 feet wide, he said.

The exhibit is also the only one that shows two dinosaur skeletons interacting, as the live creatures might have millions of years ago, Harris said. The poses not only show the two creatures' relative size, but a bit about their characteristics.

``The t. rex was this 20-foot-tall creature with this mouthful of teeth, a fierce predator or scavenger,'' Harris said. ``The triceratops was much smaller, a herbivore (plant-eater), who protected himself only with this big spiny ruff around his neck.''

The effect is sort of a rumble in the prehistoric jungle, Los Angeles style.

Dino-soar into adventure

The Natural History Museum is at 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, in Exposition Park. It's open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $6 for adults, $3.50 for children age 13-17, students and seniors, and $2 for children 5-12; admission is free the first Tuesday of every month. Free docent-led tours are given at 1 p.m. daily, except the first Tuesday of the month. Recorded information: [phone].

``Dino-Snores'' sleep-overs, scheduled for Oct. 26 and Nov. 9, cost $50 per person ($40 for museum members). Names are being taken for possible future sleep-overs if the first events exceed their limit of 35 participants. Sleep-overs are for children ages 5-12, and each slumber party participant must be accompanied by an adult.

A related program - ``Skeletons in Our Closet'' - is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. Oct. 19 at the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries (at the La Brea Tar Pits). Children ages 5-12 will tour the museum, look at X-rays, hear a talk by a paleontologist and look at bones in the museum's collection. Cost is $30 ($25 for museum members).

For reservations for both programs, call [phone].

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Photo, Box

Photo: It's a gigantic battle as a skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex, left, attacks a triceratops in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's new Dueling Dinosaurs display.

Box: Dino-soar into adventure (See Text)