The Japanese, fascinated by and well-versed in the era of dinosaurs, will get a closer look at the mammals that succeeded those creatures on Earth thanks to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and FedEx.

The museum is loaning 86 fossils from the Cenozoic Era, or the Age of Mammals, for exhibit at Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum from July 11 to Oct. 13.

FedEx, which picked up the shipment filling 12 crates and weighing 4,500 pounds yesterday morning, is donating the transportation. Delivery is due by June 27 to give two Carnegie employees time for installation, museum-speak for assembly.

"We wanted really to make this happen for the Japanese public," said Zhe-Xi Luo, the Carnegie's associate director for science and research and curator of vertebrate paleontology. "[FedEx] is very good to come to our aid."

The exhibit, at which both Dr. Luo and K. Christopher Beard, head of the Carnegie's department of vertebrate paleontology, will speak, is titled "The Extinction of Dinosaurs and the Rise of the New Rulers."

"[The Fukui] is a museum that caters to the Japanese fascination with dinosaurs. This is a work that really looks at what happened after the dinosaurs became extinct," Dr. Beard said.

"Nothing that we're sending them is a dinosaur. Ninety-eight percent of what are going over are fossil mammals. One exception is a fossil crocodile that lived alongside mammals, just to prove they're still around. The crocodile is a very ancient group. They were around all through the age of dinosaurs.

"Most of the kinds of animals we're now familiar with are in some way descendents of the fossil mammals we're sending: horses, rhinos, living deer and antelopes -- even a couple of fossil primates like lemurs and little dog-like creatures, and bear-like creatures."

Some of the fossils are relatively complete, Dr. Beard said. "We have some others that are nice skulls and we have some that are relatively fragmentary, like part of a jaw. They're still interesting and demonstrate the diversity of the mammals."

The fossil mammals being sent to Japan were in storage. "We didn't take anything off display," Dr. Beard said. "Only 1 percent of our fossils are on display at any one time."

The Carnegie, he said, probably has the fourth-largest collection of fossils in the United States and ranks among the top 10 in the world.