Museum of Nature prepares to move one-tonne dino skull
After two years of work, a helicopter will fly fossil on first leg of trip from Alberta
A helicopter will arrive in southeastern Alberta Friday to pluck a one-tonne dinosaur skull off a rocky hillside and send it to Ottawa.
After two years of field work, paleontologist Jordan Mallon will watch the skull leave the hill where it spent tens of millions of years in a matter of minutes.
The helicopter flight is unusual, but necessary.
“There’s a lot of ups and downs and the hills are pretty steep,” said Mallon, who works at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
“We have a horned dinosaur skull. These animals have the biggest skulls of any terrestrial (land) animal, ever.
“You can’t walk it out. And, it’s steep enough that you can’t drive either. There are no roads, and you can’t access it with a truck.”
So, for $7,500, a helicopter will travel about an hour from Calgary to where the skull is already wrapped in netting. This helicopter crew has lifted dinosaurs before.
The team calls the skull Lumpy, from the way it looked as it emerged from the hillside. Or, sometimes Pedro. No one remembers why Pedro.
The skull is nearly two metres long, more than a metre wide and a metre deep. It has long horns above the eyes and a shorter one on the nose. Mallon and his group found it two years ago and dug it out from the rock and soil last summer.
The field work wasn’t easy, as at least one rattlesnake popped up unexpectedly. The team borrowed a ride-on mower from the nearest farmer and cut the grass short to avoid more surprises.
“We wrapped (the skull) in a protective jacket of burlap and plaster. You’re taking long strips of burlap and dipping them in plaster and kind of pasting it on the specimen itself. That took a few days,” Mallon said.
Plastered and protected with a tarp, the skull remained undamaged all winter. Now, it’s time to lift.
“The lift itself is over in the blink of an eye … five or 10 minutes. They are going to meet us at a staging area. … They are going to come down and lower a hook. (Thursday) we are rolling the skull into the cargo net, so when they lower that hook all we’re doing is hooking that to the cargo net.”
The helicopter drops the skull where a truck can get it and flies away. After a stop at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, the skull will be shipped to the Museum of Nature, where Mallon hopes to have it on display for an open house in late October.
It is called Chasmosaurus canadensis, a rare species within the broad Chasmosaurus group — the horned dinosaurs. Triceratops is the best known part of that group.
The skull was embedded in hard rock, making it tough to remove, Mallon said.
“It’s not fun. But, actually, it has preserved the bone really well.”