See big dinosaur find now at The Children’s Museum
One of the Jurassic Period’s fiercest predators, known for ripping apart its prey before gulping it down, has arrived at The Children’s Museum. Fortunately for visitors, the Allosaurus died about 150 million years ago. Still, Indianapolis’ new friend is well preserved, with its bones fossilized in the same order as when the dinosaur was alive — what paleontologists call “articulated.”
“This Allosaurus is fairly complete and articulated with beautifully preserved skin impressions and gastralia (belly ribs), and a variety of injuries that it collected during its life,” said Laura Rooney, the museum’s curator of paleontology, in a news release announcing the find. “While any one of these features would make this a cool specimen, it’s the combination of all of them that make it remarkable.”
The Allosaurus is now on display at the museum’s R.B. Annis Mission Jurassic Paleo Lab, where a team is studying the fossil and clearing the matrix of rock around it. The legs are shown in a case in front of the lab.
The dinosaur is courtesy of Mission Jurassic, a years-long project for which the museum has leased a plot of land outside Cody, Wyoming, in the Big Horn Basin. There, paleontologists from the museum and partners Naturalis Biodiversity Center and University of Manchester have dug up land and sea creatures and trackways. Many have been added to The Children’s Museum’s revamped Dinosphere exhibition.
Paleontologists began digging on the plot in 2017, and they found and extracted the Allosaurus in 2020. The predator could grow up to 30 feet, had hollow bones, three-toed feet, large claws and almost 80 serrated teeth.
An excavator found the set of Allosaurus bones and teeth while expanding the quarry, according to the release. Its numerous characteristics are helping scientists see a clearer picture of life during the Jurassic Period. The dinosaur had a healing femur and infected tibia and fibula. Skin impressions from several parts of its body have been preserved in the rock.
“Other Allosaurus have been found with skin impressions in the past, but ours contains skin from parts of the body yet to be preserved. The skin is leathery and has scales like the feet of chickens or the body of crocodiles, not overlapping scales like lizards,” said Joseph Frederickson, lead paleontologist at the museum, in the release.
The Children’s Museum reopened its revamped Dinosphere in March of 2022, and it added several finds from the Big Horn Basin dig site. Those include two sauropods, about 65 feet long each; a marine reptile called a Baptanodon; and fossilized footprints that give clues to dinosaurs’ movements.
Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or d.bongiovanni@indystar.com. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter: @domenicareports.