Paleontologists Luis Chiappe and Pedro Mocho study a model of a Diplodocus at Research Casting International, where real dinosaurs are reconstructed.
How to bring a 75-foot-long dinosaur back to life
A team of scientists and artists transformed a jumble of bones entombed in tons of rock into a towering dinosaur that will leave visitors to L.A.'s Natural History Museum wonderstruck.
BY RICHARD CONNIFF
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG CUTLER
PUBLISHED AUGUST 13, 2024
What a strange thing it must be to become a fossil. Say you live a full life for a Diplodocus dinosaur, swinging your enormously long tail across your Jurassic world for 70 or so years. Then you die—but in such extraordinary circumstances that, against all odds, your bones are buried and transformed over time into stone. Mountains rise and wear away around you. Rivers come and go. Glaciers rumble overhead. Your bones endure.
Even stranger, a hundred or more million years later, volcanic activity comes to dominate the area. When the superheated fluids eventually cool and drain away, your stony bones have become green, highlighted here and there with red patches like roasted meat. And then the strangest turn of all: You return to the surface after an absence of 150 million years, and there you’re discovered, extricated, and reassembled by some unimaginable new species in a bizarre new world.
Step 1: Discover and dig
A team from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) first spotted the sauropod dinosaur they call Gnatalie in 2007 after erosion revealed a single leg bone beside a bluff in southeastern Utah. What they found underneath brought them back to the dig site for nine more summers. The jumble of bones—Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and others—had been swept together by the rivers of their day into a dinosaur logjam.
Even the reconstructed specimen slated to go on display at the museum this fall is not a single dinosaur but combines parts from two or more individuals of the same species found at the site. The identity of that species, which may be new to science, has yet to be determined. But with its long neck and tail and four sturdy legs, it shares many of the characteristics of the genus Diplodocus.
The team spent 10 years unearthing a dinosaur from its rocky resting place in southern Utah. Tormented by gnats during the first year of excavation, the workers nicknamed the dinosaur Gnatalie.
Photograph by Stephanie Abramowicz
Team members Jonatan Kaluza, Pedro Mocho, Alyssa Bell, and Domenic D’Amore, used concrete saws, rock hammers, chisels, and other tools to excavate the dinosaur bones still encased in rock, or matrix. They then wrapped the fossils in a heavy plaster coating to form a protective jacket.
When the time came to extract a giant pelvis, “they had ropes on either side and teams of people rocking it back and forth,” says Stephanie Abramowicz, the museum illustrator at the dig. The moment it broke free, there was a crack of thunder. “It was very clear Gnatalie was speaking to us, released from the ground, ready to live another life,” says Abramowicz.
Step 2: Prep bones
The next stop for bones coming out of the dig was the museum’s prep lab in Los Angeles. The fossils were challenging, says Doug Goodreau, who runs the lab, because the surrounding material was like cement. Preparators used an angle grinder to chunk away excess stone, with sparks and stone chips flying, as well as hammers, chisels, and dental tools for more delicate work. Another essential tool: an eye for the unexpected.
At the museum’s lab in L.A., preparators cut open the jackets and spent years removing the concrete-hard matrix. Here, preparator Erika Durazo reveals the details in a section of the dinosaur’s spine.
“Each jacket can be a quarry unto itself,” says Goodreau. Bones, teeth, and other bits must be patiently mined from the matrix. Work on one pelvis, and on bones discovered alongside it, took the better part of a year. As many as six preparators at a time worked to expose fine details, using miniature jackhammers called zip scribes and micro-sandblasters called air abraders. It sounded, says Goodreau, like a beehive buzzing. The last bit of prepping was to fill flaws and gaps with an epoxy putty close to the color of the bone but different enough to distinguish restored from original material.
Trucked from L.A. to Research Casting International (RCI) in Trenton, Ontario, the bones were form-fitted with handcrafted metal armatures.
Step 3: Reconstruct skeleton
In the summer of 2023, in a small Canadian town on the north shore of Lake Ontario, 2,600 miles from the Los Angeles museum, Gnatalie’s bones lay in shallow wooden boxes in a back room at Research Casting International (RCI), a firm specializing in rebuilding dinosaurs for museums. Some bones rested on beds of foam, others on sand, each with a manila card detailing its place in the coming reconstruction.
In a meeting room upstairs, staff from the museum and from RCI were working through details of the mount. It would measure about 75 feet long, on display in the grand entry hall of a new wing of the museum. But at the moment, it appeared that six feet of the head and neck would poke through a wall into the next room. They debated alternative positioning, but every move seemed to be constrained by architecture. Too far one way and the head might miss key ceiling anchor points. Too far the other and the tail would intrude on an emergency exit.
Despite what architects and designers imagined, the skeleton was “not just a model you can make go any way you want,” says paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute, who served from the start as leader (and head chef) at the dig. But the challenge did not seem to leave anyone flustered, insuperable obstacles being standard in paleontology. Then someone announced, a little meekly, that different design software programs had been miscommunicating: The dinosaur’s head wouldn’t poke through the wall after all.
Gnatalie’s vertebrae include a mix of fossils and 3D-printed replicas. Some 150 million years after its burial, the dinosaur will soon tower above awestruck museumgoers, as if alive again in a strange new world.
But there were plenty of real, rather than imagined, problems to solve. A large section of spine crushed and twisted during those 150 million years underground presented a major issue, for instance. Installed as is, it threatened to bend the spine in a way that would distort the entire mount. In the end, Chiappe opted to have RCI scan those vertebrae and produce uncrushed, 3D-printed substitutes for a more natural look. The real bones would be displayed below, as part of the exhibit’s message about the challenges of getting from dig to exhibition hall.
Step 4: Mount for display
Thousands of decisions and many months later, the RCI team set to work mapping parts and building corresponding steel structures to support them. A thick-walled steel post for the pelvis and the back legs went up first. Then came a horizontal steel armature following the natural curve of the spine. The reconstruction took months of painstaking labor, and none of it was permanent. Instead, the sections of armature slid together, or apart, in a neat stub-and-socket system. Steel holders attached each bone to the larger structure more firmly than in the living animal—but in such a way that any bone, or all of them, could be removed for repair or research. It would take just a few turns with an Allen wrench, as if it were all an elaborate piece of ready-to-assemble household furniture.
The crowning moment comes as RCI technician Kevin Krudwig positions the skull on the nearly completed skeleton, which measures 75 feet long—almost twice the length of the average city bus—and weighs around five tons, as much as some RVs. In life, the dinosaur (illustration, below) may have weighed two times as much. Later this fall the multimillion-dollar reconstruction will be the star attraction of a new wing of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
When everything was complete, the bones and steel were disassembled, packed in shipping crates, and trucked back across the continent to Los Angeles. There, on a plinth specially designed for this moment, the parts are coming together, more quickly this time. Going on two decades since their first sighting, the dinosaurs blended in this mount are rising up into the exhibition space they will henceforth dominate. Gnatalie’s new life, as terror and teacher to our upstart species, is beginning at last.
Read the full findings at
National Geographic Magazine - September 2024 issue
BUILDING A DINOSAUR
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