The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)
PATERSON, N.J. _ Tom Bugler bends over a 2 {-inch-wide steel rod, with his blowtorch blazing and sweat beading above his dark glasses. A few deft tugs, and the metal assumes the shape of a bone laid in the Earth more than 65 million years ago.
When he's finished, the rod will run up the back of a Tyrannosaurus rex's leg as smoothly as the seam on a pair of nylon stockings.
Peek into Phil Fraley's studio
A 19th Century megalosaur drawing
Those long legs will then stand flexed and ready to charge, as befits the top carnivore of its time. It's taken more than 60 years for someone to fix this T. rex so it can stand in death the way it towered in life. All these years, the beast has been lashed to an undignified mounting with its tail dragging in the dirt, a posture that would have dislocated its hips when alive.
Tucked away in a weedy industrial stretch of Paterson, Phil Fraley Productions is home to one of the most ambitious dinosaur reconstructions ever attempted. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History hired the studio for a dinosaur overhaul, spending $36 million to triple floor space and update tired displays for the "Dinosaurs in Their World" exhibit opening in late 2007.
More than 100 years ago, paleontologists started pulling dinosaur bones from rocks and trying to assemble them into whole creatures. The problem was, no one knew how they stood, ran or behaved. Worse, the scientists made mistakes: heads on the wrong bodies, missing body parts guessed at, and skeletons forced into unnatural postures. Over the last 40 years, paleontologists have uncovered startling finds that helped set the record straight.
Many of the 15 skeletons in the museum's display will be remounted in new action stances _ a lunging attack, a swishing tail _ to replace stiff Victorian poses. The immobile fossils will capture the feel of motion in a frozen instant. Fraley's team of 30 specialized artists and craftsmen is working with Carnegie scientists to make the re-creations vivid as well as accurate.
Thus, a charging Allosaurus, a leading carnivore of its day, is trapped forever a nip away from the whipping tail of Apatosaurus. The hulking Apatosaurus never faces off with him, but is caught just starting to swing her massive neck around. Her baby will soon be added to the scene, huddling between mother's front feet for protection.
"We're re-creating a moment here, one one-thousandth of a second that could have happened 150 million years ago," says Fraley, one of the planet's few experts in assembling fossil dinosaur bones into lifelike skeletons. His soft voice is nearly drowned out by the whoosh of a 250,000-BTU torch burning white-hot at 1,700 degrees, just right for bending venerable Pittsburgh steel into the supple forms that support Apatosaurus' 20-foot-long neck.
When Carnegie scientists unearthed a nearly complete Allosaurus skeleton in 1915 and took it back to the museum from Utah, paleontologists assembled it standing upright with its tail dragging on the ground. "They were mounted in a very straight pose for scientific study, to be able to see how they fit together. There was no sense of movement or gesture or drama," Fraley says. The result looked like a sad-sack kangaroo, hunched over and barely able to drag itself around.
But over the years, more and more fossils turned up new information. "Now we know they didn't drag their tails, because out of thousands of footprints and hundreds of tracks, we rarely see any tail marks next to them," says Carnegie paleontologist Matt Lamanna.
A paleontological renaissance began in the 1960s, when John Ostrom first discovered a raptor dinosaur, Deinonychus, that looked like it killed prey by leaping and ripping with its powerful claw. Surprised by the find, Ostrom revived an idea from the late 1800s that dinosaurs acted more like active birds than sluggish lizards.
Then in the 1990s, feathered dinosaurs and ancient birds starting pouring out of Chinese rock in Liaoning Province. A complete lineage emerged, from toothy feathered dinosaurs such as Sinosauropteryx to the earliest modern bird, the duck-like Gansus described earlier this summer. In between were intermediates such as Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis, with a modern-looking beak but claws hooking out from its wings.
"We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds," Lamanna says.
In Fraley's studio, Allosaurus now stands pitched forward, tail held high for balance. Think of a roadrunner dashing across a hot desert highway, and you've got the picture. But the fossil spent years in an unnatural state before being restored to lifelike grandeur.
Carnegie paleontologist Chris Beard bends over Allosaurus' leg to point out tiny cracks and patches of plaster from past repair jobs. "Over the years, this specimen had been coated with layers of shellac. Whenever the skeleton started to look a little old and dusty, someone would come along and add another coat," leaving the dinosaur dark and glossy.
And some of the fossils were coming apart in pieces, damaged by years of surreptitious touching and floor vibrations from millions of feet filing past.
Fraley's crew stripped off layers of shellac and grime with denatured alcohol. Underneath, the real fossil emerged, grainy and mottled with flaws and scars.
Using real fossil bones makes the Carnegie exhibit special, but also makes the work more difficult. Many museums and traveling shows use casts, lightweight reproductions made with molds. Casts are much lighter and easier to mount; Apatosaurus' fossil femur alone weighs 800 pounds while its cast counterpart seems feather-light at about 200 pounds. This exhibit will feature many skeletons that were found nearly complete, with casts used just to fill in missing parts.
Carnegie's Allosaurus, for example, was found with only part of a skull, so a cast from a better University of Utah specimen stands in. It presides over a corner of the studio with a gaping mouth and small hands crossed neatly across its chest.
"He looks really diabolical and scheming," says creative metalworker Larry Lee, who is part of the team making the metal braces, called the armature, that hold the bones together.
Reshaping the armature is key to taking a dinosaur from stiff to spry. A thick vein of metal supports the graceful underside of the giant Apatosaurus' curving neck. The armature was recycled from the original Pittsburgh steel that Andrew Carnegie ordered for his new museum's dinosaur mounts nearly 100 years ago.
Now that Apatosaurus is complete, Fraley's group will start taking it apart, bone by bone, to be shipped along with disassembled sections of armature back to the museum in Pittsburgh. There, it all goes back together again.
For now, a giant called Diplodocus is getting a bone makeover before being mounted. Technicians Jennifer Powell and Matt Ruby are focused on T. rex's foot, cleaning real bone and scraping away at casts with tiny cheese-grater-like tools called stone rasps that resculpt toes to match real specimens.
Meanwhile, ceramicist Joanie Turbek sculpts new forearms for Diplodocus, one of the longest dinosaurs that ever lived. Foam bones are coated with fiberglass and white liquid plastic that hardens to a shiny finish. Finally, moldable resin covers the whole bone and Turbek presses them all over with small green rubber stamps to add texture. The stamps are made by molding rubber to real fossil bones, creating impressions that give the casts the bumps and nicks of the real thing.
The dinosaurs won't go home to a big empty hall, either. Lush environments complete with re-created plants and animals will surround the fossils, taking visitors on a walk through dinosaur history.
Moving from the Jurassic period into the later Cretaceous, plants will change from ferns and cycads to magnolias and maples. In a transitional area between the two, a lake scene from the Liaoning Province of China will feature feathered dinosaurs and highlight connections between North American and East Asian dinosaurs.
Carnegie's exhibit is not the only one taking fossils into the modern era. Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences was one of the first museums to unveil a hall filled with updated, tail-swishing dinosaurs in 1986. One of the fixes at that time involved a little chiropractic work on the museum's Corythosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur whose vertebrae were jammed into an unnatural alignment to fit the tail-dragging fashion of paleontology's early days.
"They thought dinosaurs were reptiles and walked on four legs, so they forced it even though it didn't fit," says Anthony Paino, the academy's dinosaur hall supervisor. Now, he says, museums have loosened up and tend to focus on dinosaurs as living creatures that inhabited the entire Earth, including Antarctica.
"We're creating a dramatic scene," Fraley says. "This scene could have happened, and then you finish the story."
In Fraley's workshop, the work continues, fueled by caffeine and the constant thump of music (the CDs include works, aptly, by the Beastie Boys). And one by one, dinosaurs are freed from uncomfortable binds and settled into postures they might just remember from life.
MISTAKE-ASAURUS
Over the years Apatosaurus was known by two names, went headless for nearly 20 years, and then, to top it off, sported the wrong head.
Here's a reckoning of the mistakes and the corrections.
- In 1877, Othniel Marsh discovered and named Apatosaurus based on an incomplete skeleton.
- Two years later, Marsh found a more complete Apatosaurus but thought he'd found a new species. He coined a new name: Brontosaurus. The mistake stood until Brontosaurus was officially struck from the records in 1974.
- The original Apatosaurus fossils were found headless, so Marsh finished his specimen by adding a head found miles away on a different dinosaur, Camarasaurus. During years of confusion and suspicion that Marsh had assigned the wrong head, the Carnegie Museum first left its own specimen headless and then mounted a Camarasaurus skull in 1932. Eventually, a complete skeleton find cleared up the mystery, and Carnegie's specimen got its rightful head in 1979.
- Along with the newly aloft tail, Fraley's team updated Apatosaurus' feet to stand in more of a column instead of splayed out, moved the feet closer together, lowered the shoulders, and moved the ribs back to bring the posture into alignment.
(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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