at home with: Dinosaurs in their time

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Photograph by Joshua Franzos

Photograph by Melinda McNaugher

Photograph by Melinda McNaugher

Photograph by Melinda McNaugher

Photograph by Melinda McNaugher

Photograph by Melinda McNaugher

Two giant Tyrannosaurus rex face off, baring their teeth and gearing up for a fight. The remnants of the unfortunate creature who will become the winner’s lunch lay on the ground between them. Set against a backdrop that captures an environment from 66 million years ago, the scene is so realistic that you can almost hear the dinosaurs’ roars.

This epic battle, dubbed “T. rex vs. T. rex,” is the centerpiece of the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibit recently unveiled by Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Completed in 2008, the $36 million project was the largest renovation in the museum’s history, and the 18,600 square feet devoted to the display more than tripled the space of the former Dinosaur Hall.

Exhibit visitors are taken on a chronological and ecological journey covering almost 200 million years. They trek through the three time periods—the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods— of the Mesozoic Era, which is more commonly known as the Age of Dinosaurs. The era’s environments are depicted through 350 linear feet of murals and filled with fossils of the animals and replications of the plants that populated the Earth during that time.

“Each exhibit is meant to recreate a scene that might have occurred in a particular environment during the Age of Dinosaurs,” said Matt Lamanna, the museum’s assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology who oversaw the exhibit’s development.

Based on their occurrences in the rock record, researchers know which of the dinosaurs would have lived together, and what other animals and plants would have accompanied them.

The exhibit’s prominent focus on Tyrannosaurus rex, whose name means “tyrant lizard king” in Greek and Latin, is fitting, as it is one of the most iconic dinosaurs. Even Lamanna is drawn to it.

“My favorite dinosaur in our exhibit is our original T. rex,” he said. “If I could only stare at one of our dinosaurs for the rest of my life, it would be that one.”

That specimen, which is the dinosaur on the left as you’re facing the battle scene, does have a greater significance than the average fossil. It is the species’ holotype, the name-bearing specimen of the species – in effect, the first T. rex specimen ever found.

The museum acquired it in 1941 from the American Museum of Natural History for a mere $7,000 (the equivalent of around $100,000 today), which is quite the bargain when other institutions might spend millions on such a skeleton. The bones were shipped to Pittsburgh in 15 wooden cases and four paper cartons.The T. rex on the right-hand side of the scene is a cast, or replica, of a different specimen known as “Peck’s Rex” that was found later.

Although the bones alone can’t give a complete picture of T. rex’s huge dimensions, the skeletons effectively convey the dinosaur’s massive frame.Growing to lengths of 40 feet and weighing upwards of five or six tons, T. rex was an impressive creature. Those stats are even more remarkable when you consider that the mammoth animal was supporting the weight of an elephant, but on two legs rather than four.

Even “Jane,” the juvenile T. rex that greets visitors as they walk toward the exhibit, comes in at 21 feet in length and would have weighed 1,500 pounds. The specimens in T. rex vs. T. rex are just two of Dinosaurs in Their Time’s 19 mounted dinosaur skeletons, 15 of which incorporate real fossil bones. Indeed, 11 of these 15 consist largely of real fossils.

Another of Lamanna’s favorite spots is in the exhibit’s Jurassic atrium, where visitors can fully grasp the size of these ancient animals by standing between Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, the latter of which, at 84 feet long, necessitated the construction of a new wing when it first came to the museum.

“It’s probably the only place in the world where you can stand next to two real fossil dinosaurs of that size,” he said. Other dinosaurs range from the plated Stegosaurus to the three-horned Triceratops. Among the non-dinosaurian reptiles in the exhibit is Quetzalcoatlus, the flying reptile that looms above the T. rex scene.

While the dinos are the big draw, other specimens abound. In total, more than 230 specimens of Mesozoic plants, invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are on display. Around 75 percent of them are real fossils, and roughly 100 have never been exhibited.

The museum already had many of these “new” specimens in its collection but had no room to display them. The end result is a totally different experience for visitors.

“The dinosaurs are about the only thing that people who came to our old Dinosaur Hall might recognize,” Lamanna said.In fact, Lamanna recommends that visitors pay just as much attention to the surroundings as they do the dinosaurs.

“If visitors look closely, they’ll see that the environments are changing through the exhibit as well, particularly the plants,” he said.

Plants like buttercups and magnolia trees that are found at the end of the exhibit, and therefore the Mesozoic, will be much more recognizable than the less familiar ones in the beginning. These latter plants, Neocalamites virginiensis, bear a strong resemblance to Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, except with a bamboo trunk. Neocalamites, however, is not closely related to either of these modern plants.

The dinosaur exhibit not only was expanded, but it also draws on the latest research about the ancient animals’ biomechanics, anatomy, and posture. So, T. rex, along with the exhibit’s other dinosaurs, is posed in more accurate fashion.

“Gradually, over time, through the discovery of new fossils, paleontologists have been building a more complete picture of what dinosaurs were like as living animals,” Lamanna said, noting that even an animal’s preserved footprints can provide important clues to its mobility.

T. rex skeletons historically have been displayed standing upright with their tails dragging on the ground. Recent discoveries, however, suggest that T. rex actually held its tail up and moved with its back more parallel to the ground. Lamanna cited trackways, or repeated footprints indicating a path, lacking tail marks as one key piece of evidence that supports this conclusion.

In order to present dinosaur poses based on the latest research, the specimens had to be dismantled and then re-constructed. The duty of managing that painstaking restoration process fell to Phil Fraley Productions, a New Jersey-based firm that specializes in such endeavors.

Although the exhibit is set more than 66 million years ago, it includes a number of modern features that take advantage of 21st century technology. Interactive touch screens provide educational information on various aspects of prehistoric animal and plant life. Introductory kiosks feature dramatic three-foot tall projection globes, and four major multimedia presentations inform visitors to the exhibition.

According to museum officials, its collection of dinosaur specimens is one of the largest and most scientifically important in the world. That extensive collection has led Pittsburgh to become somewhat synonymous with dinosaurs. One even greets visitors at the airport as they fly in to our city. Pittsburgh is fortunate to have such a world-class resource.

“Carnegie Museum of Natural History is in the top five natural history museums in the country, and in our backyard. Pittsburgh should take advantage of having world-renowned cultural institutions in the area,” said the museum’s Communications and Media Relations Manager Leigh Kish.

Pittsburghers have responded enthusiastically to the attraction. Attendance at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Carnegie Museum of Art increased by 30 percent in 2008, and T. rex and its friends are partly responsible for that jump.

While all of those people aren’t coming to the museum to see him, Lamanna is just as intriguing as the dinosaurs he studies. He’s a rising star in paleontology, plucked fresh out of graduate school to become the museum’s first full-time dinosaur paleontologist since the early 20th century.

Although he didn’t expect to land it when he applied, the job has been a dream come true for Lamanna, who has been fascinated by dinosaurs since his childhood.

“I told my mom that I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was four years old,” the upstate New York native said.

As with so many of Pittsburgh’s treasures, the dinosaurs are a legacy of industrialist and museum founder Andrew Carnegie. In the late 19th century, paleontologists unearthed the first dinosaur fossils known from the American West. Carnegie happened to read a newspaper article about one of these finds, and it sparked a lifelong fascination with the creatures. He decided that his museum needed to have one, and instructed the director to get it.

The collector who claimed to have found the dinosaur that caught Carnegie’s attention refused to sell it, and later confessed that the story had been manufactured around a single bone. Carnegie funded the museum’s own team of researchers to find him a dinosaur.

They succeeded, discovering the museum’s first dinosaur, Diplodocus carnegii, which was named for the team’s benefactor.

A later expedition uncovered thousands of fossils at a single Utah locality originally called Carnegie Quarry and now the centerpiece of Dinosaur National Monument. Over a 13-year period, nearly 350 tons of fossils were shipped back to Pittsburgh, leading to one of the most comprehensive dinosaur collections in the world that garnered many accolades when it went on display for the public.

“When Dinosaur Hall opened, it was one of the best dinosaur displays on view,” Kish said. “So, it is appropriate that we continue that legacy more than 100 years later.”