T-rrific: rare dinosaur fossils crown major Smithsonian makeover
“He’s decapitating a Triceratops,” Siobhan Starrs observes casually. “You want drama with the T rex. We’ll give it to you.”
The gory scene, worthy of Jurassic Park, is frozen in time in the 31,000sqft fossil hall at the popular Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, which reopens to the public on 8 June after a massive overhaul spanning five years and costing $125m.
The Nation’s T rex, as this individual is known, will stand about 15ft tall, upright for the first time in 66m years, in this new exhibit, alongside more than 720 specimens, including dinosaurs, plants, animals and insects, ranging in size from a 90ft long Diplodocus to pollen grains of a millimetre.
To the dismay of countless parents looking for diversions on rainy days, the grand fossil hall closed in 2014 for the biggest building renovation in the museum’s history. With its 1910 architectural grandeur and ornate craftsmanship restored, what was once colloquially known as the Hall of Extinct Monsters will now be called The David H Koch Hall of Fossils – Deep Time, in recognition of a $35m gift from the controversial conservative billionaire David Koch.
The Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums and zoo contain everything from Abraham Lincoln’s last silk stovepipe hat to Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, but there had always been a T rex-shaped hole in the collection. Visitors to the old hall had to make do with a cast replica.
But 30 years ago a Montana rancher, hiking with her family on land managed by the US army corps of engineers in the Hell Creek Formation, made a startling discovery. Digging with a garden shovel and jackknife, Kathy Wankel unearthed a complete T rex arm. A local expert excavated the rest. In 2014 the specimen was loaned to the Smithsonian for 50 years and now the skeleton has been assembled.
It is an especially important T rex because of “all the debate about why the tiny little arms”, said Starrs, project manager in the museum’s office of exhibits. “It’s a very complete specimen for T rexes and it has the most complete arm ever found, including all digits, which helped advance science because this is an ongoing question: how coulda truly predatory dinosaur can take down prey if its arms are almost vestigial looking?
“We present this as a question of open science in the exhibition because it really isn’t fully resolved, but they were probably scavengers and predators both, so they were just the perfect eating machine. If they came across something that was already dead they would scavenge. But they also were truly predatory at the same time.”
Stomping on and biting the hapless triceratops, the T rex is not alone in playing to the gallery. Starrs (“I have kids so of course I love Jurassic Park”) explained: “It definitely was an important goal of ours that we wanted things to be as lifelike as possible, which doesn’t always mean high drama. So we’ve got predatory scenes like with our T-rex, which is clearly a dramatic moment, but then we also have ones where they’re slumbering or gently scratching the side of the face.
“We’re trying to capture all phases of life, not just the most dramatic. Our Allosaurus is where we decided to take a predator and put it in in a surprising pose, a nesting scene, so it’s sitting with a clutch of eggs within its protective tail curve. The idea is to make them both scientifically accurate and make you start thinking about them as a living organism that lived in a real place in an ecosystem with other living things around it, just like organisms do today.”
Other highlights in what is billed as the most visited room in the most visited natural history museum in the world include the first fossil to be given the name Stegosaurus as well as a Mastodon rearing up under a quotation from Charles Darwin: “From so simple a beginning endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” There are also some new acquisitions. Starrs said cryptically: “The most exciting one was a recent gift I can’t really talk about but it’s going to be great when visitors see it.”
During the hall’s shutdown, all specimens were removed for conservation and study by Smithsonian scientists in a network of specially created labs and storage units in the bowels of the museum (“No social media post please” reads a sign with red lines through Facebook, Twitter and camera symbols). The biggest and heaviest fossils were disassembled and transported to “dino builders” Research Casting International near Toronto in Canada, where they were repositioned into more scientifically accurate poses.
In some cases it was almost like a second excavation.
A Gorgosaurus skull, for example, that had been half-embedded in plaster during a previous preservation process turned out to have a complete other side with even a full row of teeth. The first Ceratosaurus ever found, tantalisingly inaccessible to scientists for more than a century because it was half-buried in a museum wall, was labouriously extracted with hammer and chisel and power tools.
Steve Jabo, a preparator proudly surveying the Ceratosaurus cast that will be displayed on its back in a losing fight against the Stegosaurus, explained: “It was locked in the wall in 1910. We didn’t know what the back would look like. The skull was smashed flat – it just happens geologically – but we had a guy who makes moulds reinflate it to 3D instead of being pancaked.”
The gallery will depict life on earth’s epic journey of more than 3.7bn years, teasing out themes and fundamental questions around natural selection, ecosystems changes and mass extinctions.
It also comes with a timely message about the impact of us. Starrs said: “We’re using the past as a point of entry and understanding the human footprint on the planet today. That’s revolutionary.
“Are we headed to another mass extinction and are we driving that as a species? It was an asteroid and now is it humans? We tackle these questions in the exhibition which I’ve never seen done in a fossil hall before.”
Yet the hall will carry David Koch’s name. He and his brother Charles have sent at least $100m directly to 84 groups denying climate change science since 1997, according to Greenpeace. David Koch’s donation comes at a time when museums are under greater scrutiny than ever over their sources of funding. Last April protesters gathered at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M Sackler Gallery of Art to focus attention on what they claim is the wealthy family’s role in the opioid crisis.
Randall Kremer, the director of public affairs at the Natural History Museum, said: “The question certainly comes up but we don’t vet our donors on anything more than whether they believe in the mission. In the case of Mr Koch, he’s been on the board of the museum for a decade and is one of the preeminent philanthropists in the United States. Beyond that, it’s not an issue.”