Pete III Final Update: In Its Forever Home

This post has been a long time coming. A little over 13 years from when we first dug a hole in the ground for a toe fragment in Central Montana, our giant Daspletosaurus sp. "Pete III" is now on permanent display at the Cincinnati Museum Center! A photo of Pete's metatarsal was prominently featured in my first blog post here way back in 2010. We put over a decade into excavating, preparing, scanning, molding, casting and assembling this specimen (click these links to go directly to the older content). I'm happy that it's finally done, but I'm kinda sad to see it go all the same.

The original hole in the ground, field season 2005

The first ugly toe. It got better.

You can search all those old posts on the blog for progress, but now I'd like to share with you the finished product! We mounted all of the original bones (minus the skull, those bones are still loose and in the collections in Cincinnati) on an external steel armature with removable brackets so that anything that needs to be taken off of display for research can easily be done. Daspletosaurus is much more rare than "boring old" Tyrannosaurus rex so the research value of this specimen should be high.

Copies of this ungual can be purchased at www.deeptimefossils.com

The mount itself is a fairly conservative pose, not really running, not really mouth-wide-open. Viewed from near the Allosaurus, it seems to tower over the city skyline (hold the Chili). The restored art deco hall that Pete III now calls home is an exhibit itself and was very well done.

I really like this shot

We tried to make the supporting steel as visually unobtrusive as possible while still being substantial enough to do its job of holding up hundreds of pounds of real bone (and quite a bit of super glue). There might just be as much steel by weight as original bone in this mount, but it really doesn't feel like it.

Every bone gets its own personal mounting steel support

We're really happy how this mount turned out and now all you tyrannosaur researchers out there know who to talk to about planning a visit and publishing. No more excuse to pretend it doesn't exist anymore! And if you notice, things look "unfinished" in the photographs. This is because I helped install it back in August, so if you have better pictures of the display from your next visit I'd love to see them! Here's to thousands and thousands of visitors liking this specimen just as much as we do!

The finished mount, curator for scale

An even better photo without the curator

Pete's huge (as far as tyrannosaurs go) arm

Reconstructing Chelosphargis: What to do with a pile of bones

We spend a lot of time in Kansas hunting for specimens in the Niobrara chalk. A whole lot of time. Luckily the soft chalk erodes pretty quickly so we also find a whole lot of stuff. Occasionally though, other people also get lucky and we'll happily take the specimen off their hands. In early 2015 this exact scenario played out. You may have seen the result at our display booth at SVP this year in Salt Lake City, overshadowed by our exciting mount of our Daspletosaurus "Pete III"

Curator shadow selfie while digging in Kansas recently

A poorly collected turtle specimen from the chalk was being shown around looking for a buyer, While the collection techniques caused some damage to the fossil, it was plain to see a fairly complete tiny Protostegid was encased in the slabs of yellow rock.

So, this is how we got it. Clearly not how we would collect a specimen.

Most importantly, almost all of the skull was there, which is really nice. We immediately acquired the specimen and prepared the parts. Quickly it became evident we had a older subadult specimen of the relatively rare taxon Chelosphargis advena, an 84 million year old relative of the much larger Protostega and Archelon.

The parts after prep

Skull partway through prep

As you can see, most of the animal was there, in fact it's one of the most complete Chelosphargis specimens ever discovered. But what do you do with a pile of bones once they're all prepared? We're one of the few places with the knowledge, experience and capability to do a complete cast restoration without damaging the original bones. The first step was to mold everything as-is, so we can have parts (sometimes even multiples) to work with.

Cast skull copies getting cut and shaped to take out distortion

Distortion is taken out of the plastic and missing parts are either fabricated from similar ones from this animal, scanned in and resized from other specimens, or in rare cases done the old way with sculpting from reference material.

Carapace getting parts added and completed

The restored parts are then molded again in units so that we can make our final copy and offer it to museums and the general public as a highly detailed cast skeletal mount, perfect for display anywhere. The entire project only takes a few weeks, but the result is pretty phenomenal!

Final product!

Pete III finished. For now.

Just for the weekend, the prototype cast of our Daspletosaurus Pete III (RMDRC 06-005) will be shown off in the atrium of the museum, before it gets decent photographs and heads to its forever home. Yes, it has a 2006 specimen number.

The original site as found/explored in July 2005. We were so young.

We've been working on this for a decade. I'm not sure if I should take the day off to celebrate, or take advantage of the free time of getting a huge project off my plate and start something new and exciting. In the meantime, enjoy some of the snowy photos, better well-lit ones to come in a week.

So, this is what a pile of Daspletosaurus looks like

It just looks like such a fast critter, not like dumpy Tyrannosaurus

Nearly 11m of birdy goodness

Daspletosaurus Assembly: Building a Frightful Lizard

There is actually a very good reason why I haven't updated this blog in a while: We've been up to our armpits in the lab building the prototype cast copy of Pete III, our 11m Daspletosaurus.

Ilium cast fresh in the mold

Progress is going quick by Academic standards, and we hope to finish the cast by early May.

Both feet before assembly

Jacob and I called "dibs" on making this skeleton, since we've been working on the project for 10 years.

We just admired this for a few days

It really is a great thing to see all this hard work finally amount to something tangible

Making the pubis. It is no longer blue

Plus everyone loves a huge tyrannosaur, especially one way more rare than T. rex.

Progress as of a few days ago. Tail is 17 feet (5.2m) long

Stay tuned for some more exciting progress really soon. We're finishing the neck, working out the gastral basket and have a few cervical ribs to go. 

Everyone loves a little tail

Or even a huge one. Just wanted to share some cool pics we took of Pete III's 5.1m long (17 foot) tail. Caudal 1 is missing from this layout (it was still in the pelvis jacket), so add on another 18cm or so.

Not too shabby

Jacob, our living 2m scalebar

The Fossil Brewing Company shirt is apt

A day in the life of a Daspletosaurus bone

Some people asked me not too long ago about what we do in order to get some of these bones ready for molding. In the case of Pete III, our Daspletosaurus from Montana, the condition of the bone gave us some additional problems. All specimens of course get excavated and painstakingly prepared by our expert staff, but in Pete III's case, even the prep necessitated the invention of new techniques which I published on a few years back. The entire specimen was pixelated, with some bones made up of hundreds of thousands of fragments. Lots of glue was needed to even expose the bone, which is huge, literally Tyrannosaurus rex sized. Once done the left ilium looked kind of like this:

Next up is reconstruction of any major missing bits and holes with epoxy putty like Aves Apoxie Sculpt. That's the grey stuff.

We then apply a barrier layer of B-72 to hold everything together for the next steps. Shiny!

Then we take our gorgeous bone and smear the whole thing with tinted Hydrocal.

 Yuck. OK now it doesn't even look like a fossil. Never fear, most of it will be gone soon. The main aim is to work the Hydrocal into all the seriously tiny cracks in the surface to better hold the bone together. This also reduces the amount of the relief in the specimen so molding goes much faster. The excess on the surface is removed with air abrasion.

Doesn't look so shiny anymore, but we can fix that with a wee bit more of very thin B-72.

And there you have it, one half of a bone restored in a few days time. Now we just make a support jacket so the entire thing can be flipped over and the process repeated.

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

Daspletosaurus reconstruction progressing: Pete III

You know, I think I'm just going to share some pictures as an update to my last blog post. We'll keep the reading part short and sweet. Restoration is coming along well. The skull is up next, and in the meantime we have the leg finished and the arms almost there. Lots more to come over the next few months. It's always good to have new tyrannosaur stuff to play with.

Pete III's scaps and arms

The scapulae were remarkably well preserved in 3D

Left leg before paint

After paint, left leg from the rear

Side view, the leg is HUGE!

Pete III makes progress: Molding a Daspletosaurus

It's been a long time, not only since I updated the blog, but since we've had any news about our big Daspletosaurus specimen that we dug up in 2006. Well, that's changing now.

Original and prototyped bones

This is basically an update on a post from a few months back where I covered the scanning and printing process if the leg. To get the project moving along we picked some of the low hanging fruit: finishing the left leg! Since this leg was almost complete (missing just one phalanx and strangely, metatarsal III) the restoration was pretty straightforward, comprising of just crack filling. The digits were molded in gang molds and we produced a mighty fine block of metatarsals II through IV.

Original leg ready to mold

That block as well as the long bones were molded so that they can be loaded onto our spin casting machine, enabling us to make high-fidelity hollow casts (saves a lot of weight) that we later fill with urethane foam for durability.

Cast copy of the left pes ready for assembly.

This leg should be ready for display in about 10 days, so don't forget to come by the museum to check it out.

Scanning a Daspletosaurus

So we all know that fossil skeletons are rarely found 100% intact. This is especially true for larger animals for a number of reasons, from scavenging to paleoerosion to roots to modern weathering. Even with the mighty tyrannosaurs this is true: Sue? Missing bits. Ivan? even less complete. Sir William? The dozens of shed tyrannosaur teeth at the site might be a hint where lots of the parts went. Yum.

Field map of quarry

Quarry during dig

During excavation of Pete III, the TPI field crews kept careful records to document the site properly (as all paleontologists should, I don't care if you're academic or commercial). As we excavated and uncovered bones, they were assigned field inventory numbers, recorded and were mapped to scale. It quickly became apparent that there were only enough leg elements for one. The other one was gone, but where did it end up?

Ankle bone mirrored in the computer

Microstratigraphy along with the mapping provided a possible answer. The sediment indicated that Pete III was located in a crevasse splay deposit. These deposits are formed when a natural levee breaks, squirting water and sediment over the adjacent floodplain. It's like a geological zit. This particular rupture apparently contained a Daspletosaurus in early stages of decomposition, where the bones were still articulated and loosely held together, though some were washed further on. Unfortunately, we think that's where the right leg ended up. We were 75 million years too late.

Original and printed bones, various colors of PLA

OK, so I had to sculpt one bone by hand

So what can we do? A one legged Daspletosaurus mount looks stupid. In the old days we would sit down with some material, a ruler and our eyeballs and sculpt the mirror image by hand. Luckily we don't live in the stone age anymore and instead we have computers and lasers and hot plastic.

Project layout. Pete's skull will be about 1.8x the size of the cast on the table.

We were missing one phalanx completely, so we laser scanned one from our Albertosaurus cast, blew it up to size, and then printed it. The entire right foot was scanned from the left, mirror imaged in the computer and then printed in full scale. We're still in the process of scanning the femur, tibia and fibula, but instead of printing them (which would take a lot of time) we are sending the files to someone with a 5 axis CNC router to carve them for us. Work smarter, not harder!