The juvenile Barosaurus had just been laid out on the floor in the
American Museum of Natural History
when a staff member noticed a piece of candy corn wedged in the
creature’s mouth. “So that’s what killed the dinosaurs,” said Alec
Madoff, a senior preparator at the museum who had wielded the saw that
felled the dinosaur.
Actually,
what did in the 24-foot-long Barosaurus replica was not diet but the
arrival of an outsize beast that has come to claim its coveted piece of
real estate.
On
Friday, the museum will unveil the cast of a 122-foot-long dinosaur
whose remains belong to a group known as titanosaurs, and that is one of
the largest dinosaurs ever found. It is too big, in fact, to fit
completely inside its new home.
The
museum’s dinosaur exhibition is already one of its biggest draws,
luring throngs of T. rex-loving tourists and New Yorkers alike. So how
to top what the museum already has to offer?
Perhaps a bigger dinosaur.
The
new species, which has yet to be named, was discovered in Argentina in
2014, and Mark Norell, the chairman of the museum’s department of
paleontology, knew he wanted the Manhattan museum to be first to present
the herbivore to the public.
“It’s
an incredible find,” he said, explaining that it will take decades of
study to glean its scientific significance but that “what makes it
important now is knowing there are really large creatures out there and
that research may show how such animals could exist.”
Mr.
Norell initially considered putting just some of the dinosaur’s remains
on display, but decided that casting the entire skeleton would be far
more impressive. Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president, predicts that
the unnamed titanosaur “will join the pantheon of museum icons,” like
the majestic blue whale suspended from a ceiling in the Milstein Hall of
Ocean Life, or the imposing Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the Hall of
Saurischian Dinosaurs.
The
Wallach Orientation Center on the fourth floor was a perfect fit,
mostly because it is not; the titanosaur is so long that its head
extends six feet out into a hallway, creating a dramatic visual
invitation to visitors. The Barosaurus had been the room’s centerpiece
since 1996.
First,
workers smashed open the Barosaurus’s underbelly with a mallet so
someone could get inside to guide the sawing process, avoiding the
24-foot pipe that ran from the head to the tail. “Once we found a bottle
of Scotch inside a Tyrannosaurus model,” Mr. Norell said. The
Barosaurus’s innards contained just a paint brush and a bucket.
The
dinosaur did not go easily. The section including its hind legs and
tail became a challenge. It took five people, including one standing
inside the cast model, another with a crowbar and a third who made a
last-minute run for WD-40, to finally twist and wriggle the piece free.
For
the Barosaurus to be lent to other museums, the front two-thirds needed
to be carved into two pieces, so Melissa Posen, senior director of
exhibition operations, issued a decree: “Off with its head.”
In
the Canadian province of Ontario, Peter May, the founder of Research
Casting International, was building the new behemoth. Mr. May’s crew
scanned digital images of the fossil in Argentina to create a mold, then
built a lightweight fiberglass cast, stuffed with foam to hold its
shape and held together by an internal system of steel bars. Mr. Norell
provided physical and digital models of the room where the dinosaur
would be displayed. The doorways were precisely measured.
By
Jan. 2, the titanosaur was ready to go, but without a head. With no
skull, fossil paleontologists had initially estimated that the head was
about four and a half feet long, Mr. May said, but subsequent study led
to a last-minute revision, and the skull lost more than a quarter of its
length.
Then
there was another glitch. The truck carrying the metal base down from
Canada was stopped at the border over a paperwork issue, pushing
construction back by a day.
Last
week, museum workers steered the huge components, like the femur, on
wooden dollies, out from a garage and through the museum’s corridors.
The pieces on parade were met with expressions of bewilderment and
amazement in a variety of languages, though the lingua franca was the
quick deployment of cellphones for photos and videos.
Then
came an urgent call from the garage. The pelvis would not fit through
the doors. “We measured it and there’s an inch to spare,” one of Mr.
May’s workers said.
“Better
that they scrape it than us,” a museum employee said as Mr. May’s team
successfully nudged it through, albeit with one edge brushing against
the garage door.
With
the frame finally assembled, the hind legs, each 17 feet long and
weighing over 700 pounds, were hoisted into place with relative ease.
The pelvis again presented a problem. During a trial run in Canada, a
crane and forklift had hoisted the piece into place. But Mr. May knew
that the approach would not work in New York because the space was more
confined; the titanosaur was so tall it had to be posed with its legs
bent, as if it were about to sit, and even then it would come within two
inches of the ceiling.
He
brought in four roustabouts (old-fashioned hand-cranked cranes) to lift
the 9-foot-long, 9-foot-wide pelvis but discovered that the light
fixtures were blocking their way. The crew members had to move the base
they had just finished installing to give themselves the room they
needed. Finally, after adjustments lasting 90 minutes, the pelvis could
be put into place.
The
skull was the last piece to be fitted onto the colossal creature, and
David Harvey, senior vice president for exhibitions, had the final say
on how it would be positioned.
It
was a subjective decision, Mr. Harvey said, a blend of science, art and
pragmatism. He consulted with Mr. Norell, who preferred a downward
angle, for realism. But “its personality will tell us where it wants to
be,” Mr. Harvey said, as workers tilted the skull this way and that and
he examined it from different vantage points.
With
the visual dramatics satisfied, a final measurement was taken. The
skull, Mr. Harvey said, “has to be at least nine and a half feet high
because we don’t want high school kids jumping up and slapping it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment