Triceratops is a museum icon. Next, he’s T. rex fodder
WASHINGTON: When a dinosaur nicknamed “Hatcher” was cobbled together a century ago, he was the first triceratops the world had seen in 66 million years. And he looked the worse for it.
The triceratops mount that went on display in 1905 was stooped and awkward. No one had yet found a complete skeleton of this species, so curators used bones from 10 distinct individuals and relied on educated guesses to put them all together. The result was a creature with a head too small for its body and arms of different lengths. Its feet came from a duck-billed dinosaur, an animal from an entirely different family.
“That skeleton was a little bit of a Frankenstein,” admitted paleontologist Matthew Carrano, dinosaur curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
Now Hatcher faces his greatest indignity yet: He’s going to be fed to a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Hatcher was posed clumsily in his original mount, with legs splayed at uncomfortable angles. Staff at what was then called the US National Museum drilled holes through the ancient animal’s bones to install metal bars that held the mount together, something curators shudder at today.
Still, looming at the centre of the museum’s “Hall of Extinct Monsters,” Hatcher was an impressive sight - in 1905, The Washington Post described the new specimen as “the most fantastic and grotesque of all that race of giant lizards known as dinosaurs.”
But he didn’t really seem like something that was once alive.
“When Hatcher came to the Smithsonian, dinosaurs were becoming quite famous,” Carrano said. “But at the same time, we didn’t understand them as animals.
“We didn’t know that much about their biology or even how they were all put together.”
It took nearly a century of research for the museum to recognise its mistakes and finally set Hatcher to rights. In 1998, the fossils that constituted the dinosaur were taken off display and replaced with a new, properly proportioned mount made from casts of the bones.
Some were scaled up or shrunk down to account for their mismatched sizes. At the unveiling, the triceratops was officially christened “Hatcher,” in honour of John Bell Hatcher, the paleontologist who found the bulk of his bones.
Now the triceratops guards the entrance to the Last American Dinosaurs exhibit, his massive head tilted forward, his powerful legs planted firmly beneath him.
But the new-and-improved Hatcher isn’t long for this world. When the museum opens its new fossil hall in 2019, a fearsome T. rex will be the star of the exhibit – and Hatcher will be lying at the predator’s feet, about to become its next meal.
It’s a brutal but fitting next chapter in the dinosaur’s long career at the museum, according to Carrano.
When Hatcher arrived at NMNH 112 years ago, he was a bundle of bones with no backstory. In his death scene, he will embody everything scientists have learned about triceratops since then.