Finally, the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is the same species as the researchers under him -- a natural scientist.

Samuel McElroy Taylor is a marine biologist who marvels at the bloom of an orchid, the wing span of a butterfly, the arc of a dinosaur bone.

But don't expect an arcane scientist who stares at desiccated bones all day and never looks out the window.

The new director, who took over April 1 after much turnover at the top, is all about opening the museum doors and luring the crowds inside.

In fact, he made a Ph.D. out of the study of museum visitors. The minute customers walk through a door, he explains, they make a sharp right. "If you put material to the left, it is guaranteed they will not look at it."

If that sounds like a grocer arranging cereal box shelf displays, he won't argue. "It is exactly like retail. A lot of people think it cheapens it. But people vote with their feet."

Just how many feet pour through the museum doors in the coming years is key at this time in the museum's history. Basking in the glow of its newly redone "Dinosaurs in Their Time" collection, the museum nonetheless faces a tough economy and stiff competition for the entertainment dollar, not just from the art museum -- a society donor favorite next door -- and a flashier Carnegie Science Center across town, but also movies, video games and amusement parks.

"I think Sam Taylor could be very good," said John Rawlins, associate curator of the section of invertebrate zoology. "We are waiting and watching."

But it's no easy job. He will have to nudge scientists who can sometimes be ornery, Dr. Rawlins said, and he will have to diversify the museum beyond dinosaurs. "The museum cannot push the same fossil button," Dr. Rawlins said, "or it will become fossilized."

Dr. Taylor agrees that the Carnegie, one of the five largest natural history museums in the world, with an annual budget topping $13 million, has to diversify and display some of its other first-rate collections such as insects. "Dinosaurs is a bone of contention among life scientists," he says. "Some feel we are like CNN -- all dinosaurs, all the time."

Dr. Taylor, 57, sinks his lean 6-foot frame into an earth-toned couch that was once in the office of the 5-foot-1 Andrew Carnegie. Dr. Taylor looks formidable, almost stern, on the small Victorian couch until he flashes a glimmer of a smile and says, "This could stand a cushion."

"He has an evil sense of humor," said paleontologist Mary Dawson, meaning it as a compliment. "He has a very good sense of humor. He doesn't take himself too seriously."

He wears a well-cut suit with tiny, tasteful checks, looking dapper as he walks past exuberant kids gawking at hulking dinosaurs. But he is really more comfortable outside in work clothes, his hands in the dirt gardening or hiking through the woods.

He and his partner, Michael Henderson, a retired Natural Park Service superintendent, are renting a Squirrel Hill home after moving here from Bedminster, N.J.

They buy cable service for the Internet. They have no TV. "I am not a child of the mass media," said Dr. Taylor, who cannot name a favorite movie. Marketing dinosaur bones is one thing. Toothpaste commercials are something else. "They are awful."

This is his second time he has worked at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. From 1983-86, he started his career as a program specialist in the education department, the only male in an all-female department. He was young and idealistic and got a lesson in reality.

Dr. Rawlins remembers the young man saying, " 'What's up with this place and all these fossilized curators?' "

Dr. Taylor puts it another way: "I was young and naive. You have ideas how people should do their jobs. You find out it doesn't matter.

"I thought I could change the world, but my job description was bottom-feeder."

Today, he's at the top of the natural history museum -- a journey that began when he first discovered nature as a young boy growing up in the prairie of Big Falls, Mont., riding horses and fishing. He would dig up cow bones on a nearby farm and declare them dinosaur bones.

The first museum he ever visited was the Carnegie Natural History Museum at age 7, during a visit to his grandparents in Latrobe. He remembers dinosaur hall.

Other kids would say they wanted to be a fireman or a police officer. A young Sam, weaned on images of Jacques Cousteau hanging out on the deck of the Calypso, would say he wanted to be a marine biologist. "It was my exotic ticket out of Montana."

He received a degree in biology at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Colo., before earning his master's degree at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California. But he discovered he didn't like how advanced science became more and more specialized.

"I wanted to do everything," he said. "I wanted to be the Victorian naturalist. I want to study butterflies. I want to look at the stars. I want to study the fish. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life studying fish hemoglobin."

So he decided to study museums themselves, earning a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkley in science and mathematics education.

He would study museum visitors -- really look at them -- and come up with theories on "museum fatigue," the affliction that causes visitors to look dazed as they read yet another sign with more mind-numbing facts.

He said he found that visitors might stop at 25 displays and they would spend less time with each subsequent exhibit.

"Mom's feet are tired. Everyone is hungry. The time spent per exhibit is diminishing. Compare that to all museums, where the introduction is facts and facts and facts. And it summed up at the end with a spectacular display where the visitor is spending the least amount of time. It is counter-intuitive to the way people are behaving."

Such training helped him after he left the Carnegie in 1986 to become biology director of the New York Hall of Science, where he developed an interactive exhibit in biology and sponsored the development of the Wentz-Scope (the easy-view microscope found in most museums). From 1990 to 1996, he was director of exhibitions at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he oversaw a big exhibition on global warning. From 1996 to 2001, he did work at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. He was also a museum consultant.

Looking at nature always amazes him. "The beauty of art in nature is always superior to what mankind attempts to create."

He has had a lot of experience working with scientists, who are trained to question authority.

"He has gone through 'Dante's Inferno' twice," Dr. Rawlins said. "American Museum of Natural History and California Academy of Sciences -- both premier institutions and both with some ornery scientists."

Dr. Taylor said scientists tend to get riled up when people oversimplify their work. "Some people think you have to doll it up or dumb it down. To me, it is a disservice to the audience. There is no story more fascinating in the whole world than the actual facts of how the planet works."