Dinosaur display will return in a year after update
PAT WOLFINBARGER UW Media Relations | Posted: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 12:00 am
LARAMIE - A prominent member of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum is on a yearlong sabbatical.
The 75-foot-long fossil display of the apatosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur that roamed Wyoming 150 million years ago, has been dismantled except for a one-ton section of its upper hip area. The dinosaur fossil will return with its display updated to reflect the latest paleontological research findings, said Brent Breithaupt, UW Geological Museum director.
"This is our first opportunity to enhance the fossil display since it was established by Samuel H. Knight in 1960," Breithaupt said. "Professor Knight did a wonderful job of putting the apatosaurus together based on the resources and knowledge of the times. We will be able to add some of the dinosaur's bones that Professor Knight didn't have at the time to improve the display's looks, such as posing it with its tail in the air instead of dragging on the ground."
This month, Treibold Paleontology Inc. of Woodland Park, Colo., dismantled the apatosaurus display. Treibold is a professional firm with expertise in casting skeletons and fossil mounting. The company will make a cast of the apatosaurus fossil that will be available for other museums to use for displays, Breithaupt says.
The apatosaurus fossil was about 60 percent bone, with the rest of the display cast from molds created by Knight. Treibold will take those pieces and make them more bonelike in appearance. The company will use a form of resin to create the new casts that will make those sections, such as the tail, lighter and easier to manipulate for display.
"This will be a 21st century dinosaur display when it's unveiled next year," Breithaupt said.
The dismantling project also gives researchers worldwide an opportunity to study the apatosaurus fossils close-up.
"It's kind of difficult to take measurements or do close inspections on a ladder 15 feet in the air," Breithaupt said.
While the apatosaurus is gone, new displays featuring duckbill dinosaurs and a sea reptile on loan from Treibold will be displayed, Breithaupt added.
UW's apatosaurus is one of only six such displays in the world. In 1901, members of an expedition from the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, Pa., found the fossil 70 miles north of Laramie. The fossil was shipped back east with the anticipation it would by mounted. However, another skeleton of the dinosaur was discovered in northern Utah, and the museum chose to mount that specimen instead.
In storage for 50 years, the Wyoming apatosaurus was brought back to the state by Knight as part of a fossil exchange. Assembling the fossil was a work of love for Knight, who died in 1975.
Knight, a UW professor of geology for almost half a century, elevated the UW Department of Geology and Geophysics to one of the nation's best. Among his many contributions to UW are designing the S.H. Knight Geology Building, working to rebuild the Geological Museum after it was nearly destroyed by water damage in the late 1920s, painting large murals of prehistoric life still on display in the UW Geological Museum, and creating the life-size, copper-plated statue of tyrannosaurus rex that stands next to the museum. Knight taught more than 15,000 UW students during his career.
Bob Wallin was an undergraduate student who worked in the geology preparation room while Knight assembled the apatosaurus.
"He was completely focused on that dinosaur," recalled Wallin, now a retired real estate agent in Shell. "He would turn up his hearing aid when he saw me and say hello, then back to work he went. He spent hours on that project. I worked at the museum for two years and left before he finished. You could tell he loved every minute of it."
The only modification of the display was in 1981, when Breithaupt replaced the apatosaurus head to correct a mistake made when the dinosaur was first discovered in the 1870s. Based on findings at the time, paleontologists mistakenly placed a head from another dinosaur species, camarasaurus, on the apatosaurus skeleton. In addition, they also renamed the dinosaur brontosaurus, leading to many years of confusion over the dinosaur's correct identity.
Although the mistake was rectified in the early 1900s, it wasn't until the 1970s that it was proven that the traditional "brontosaurus" image known to all was, in fact, an apatosaurus with the wrong head. The camarasaurus head remains on display at the UW Geological Museum.