WASHINGTON — Without question, dinosaurs are the main attraction at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, but a remodeling project has left many of the skeletons displaced, and a new hall to display them won’t be finished until 2019.

“In the meantime, we need to have a dinosaur presence at the Museum,” says exhibit developer Sally Love Connell. “Because what is natural history without a few dinosaurs?”

Now, a new exhibit, “The Last American Dinosaurs: Discovering a Lost World,” looks to showcase two of the Museum’s most popular — and massive — dinosaurs, while also telling a more in-depth story of how and when they lived.

It centers around two of the Museums’ titans, which are posed in a way that suggests they may be ready to square off. Visitors will first see the Museum’s massive triceratops skeleton. “We have it juxtaposed here with the other dominant dinosaur in this ecosystem, T-Rex,” says curator Hans-Dieter Sues.

More than just displaying those dinosaurs and others, the exhibit looks to serve as a snapshot of how the final dinosaurs in North America lived before they went extinct about 66 million years ago.

“This is sort of recreating the world just before this huge rock fell from the sky,” Sues says.

The dinosaurs in the exhibit come from a fossil-rich area that includes parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. Those behind the exhibit wanted to re-create that landscape and were able to find something similar at a creek in southern Maryland.

A photo of the creek was turned into a mural, and animals from the past were added, including a large plant-eating dinosaur and a pterodactyl.

“But then you see familiar animals,” including a turtle, an alligator, and a relative of the opossum, which were alive at the same time, Seus says. “It was sort of a world that at once was somewhat familiar but in some ways oddly different.”

The exhibit opens to the public on Nov. 25.

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