By DIANE GASPER-O'BRIEN

dobrien@dailynews.net

Gary Staab chuckles when people call him a Hays native.

While that is true -- Staab was born in Hays in the late 1960s -- he doesn't remember living here because his parents moved to Nebraska before his first birthday.

However, Hays does feel like home to him in a way.

Staab has several relatives living in and around the Hays area, and he is looking forward to his trip this weekend -- to give a presentation at Fort Hays State University's Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

Staab is scheduled to talk about making the SuperCroc at a donors' dinner tonight.

His 1 p.m. hands-on activity will be part of the museum's opening of the traveling exhibit, "The Science of SuperCroc," which includes a 40-foot long, 10-ton fossil cast of the largest crocodile to ever walk the earth.

The exhibit opens to the public at 10 a.m.

Staab is a paleoartist who has worked on his own for the past three years and freelances for National Geographic.

He formerly worked as a sculptor for the Denver Museum of Science and Nature and now lives in Kearney, Mo.

He constructed the "fleshed out" version of the SuperCroc, which will be part of the entire exhibit at Sternberg through Aug. 5.

"I work with a small model and create templates of cross sections, then sculpt the whole thing in clay," he explained.

"It's like building a house that you have to be able to move in a day."

Staab will get the chance to show children how he goes about his work when he helps them build model dinosaurs out of clay Saturday.

"This is such a fun line of work," he said. "And I love coming back to Hays. Usually, I fossil hunt my way all the back there."