It's Tucson Time Again

Sorry for the lack of updates. We're working on a ton of new projects this winter for an awesome Tucson gem and Mineral show. A few teaser pics, more and better ones as we get closer to shipping the show. Now back to the salt mines.

Enchodus vs. Hamburger-sized turtle

Newest fish

Headbutting Sandy

Cap'n Chuck's back end

Platecarpus restoration complete! All hail Cap'n Chuck!

After 8 long years of work, our Platecarpus tympaniticus specimen RMDRC 06-009 "Cap'n Chuck" is finally finished! These last few weeks of the project had been dedicated to finishing the details of the armature as well as packing it for its trip to its new museum forever home. It seems like just yesterday when I was lifted in a freezing drizzle in a Bobcat excavator bucket one October day to investigate a lonely vertebra poking out of the side of a gully wall. Poking around revealed what looked like the rear of a skull, and we decided to come back the following spring to finish the job.

Working on turning a vertical surface into a flat surface

By the time we completed the excavation, we could walk down the debris pile to the gully bottom. We took out multiple jackets since the bone density was so high, working on them in the lab was much safer for the specimen.

Main body and skull block in the Show Prep stage

Once "show prepped" (preparing the jackets to show what is inside of them) we disassembled them and placed the bones in drawers in the Clean Room for safe keeping. There it stayed for years until a customer was found.

Coming together. The white bleached bone 4th from the left is the first bone found

Earlier this year we started restoring the bones for mounting. While we had the bones handy, Cap'n Chuck was molded so copies can be sent to other museums in the future. The mosasaur was incredibly undistorted, the ribs were even round in cross section, unlike the typical Kansas condition of being squished pancake flat.

Dillon (left) vs. Cap'n Chuck (right)

Snakey!

The final result is pretty spectacular. The undistorted ribs helped us get a very accurately shaped torso, with cartilage and even an interclavicle. The skull is beefy and bulldog-like, much different than the lower chalk specimens of Plesioplatecarpus planifrons.

Showing off the pterygoid teeth

Paddle and chest detail

Vertebrae are much larger and more robust than the lower chalk specimens. Surprisingly, the finished mosasaur was a bit shorter in length than we had anticipated, coming in at just over 17 feet (5m) long.

Skull detail

Cap'n Chuck Rises: A Teaser

Like many places, progress on various projects here ebbs and flows. Sadly, the Pete III Daspletosaurus restoration project has been temporarily put on hold so we can address more pressing matters. In this case, it's Cap'n Chuck (RMDRC 06-009), a fairly complete and extremely well preserved Platecarpus tympaniticus specimen that I discovered one cold October day in 2006. A recap of the early part of the project can be found by clicking here. Once prepared the specimen sat in drawers in my office for years.

Squalicorax bites on the top of the skull

That's a nice set of ribs

Recently the powers that be have decided that we should restore and mold the skeleton to replace the smaller Platecarpus planifrons skeleton in our cast catalog. Comparing it to the lower chalk mosasaur, Cap'n Chuck has a nearly identical skull length, more gracile lower jaws and wider top of the skull, however its postcranial skeleton is radically different in proportions. Humerei and vertebrae are nearly twice as big. The ribs are surprisingly uncrushed, preserving their original round cross section as well as curvature. In fact they are so well preserved we can even with some degree of certainty determine which ones belong on the left or right side (nearly imossible to do on typically crushed ribs).

Lower jaws, slender and displaying symmetrical tooth replacement

Nearly complete axis showing beefiness

The differences really are amazing. A few years back, Takuya Konishi split Platecarpus planifrons into its own genus: Plesioplatecarpus. I was very skeptical of this split for a long while, but now after comparing the low chalk mosasaur against its upper chalk relative, I'm really beginning to see his point.