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

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

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!

And now for something slightly different

You all deserve a brief respite from the dead fish and Avaceratops update barrage. What better excuse to talk about our big Daspletosaurus Pete III then? It's about the only dinosaur we have that people tend to ask about anyway. We've had an opportunity to catch up on a few projects lately and are able to spend some time in preparing the final few bones from their field jackets, while also restoring the skull bones to get them ready for 3d laser scanning and printing.

Bryan finishing the neural arch of caudal 2

I'm sure you have heard about the special challenges that preparing Pete III poses. I even did a paper on it, which is posted on my academia.edu page. When done, the bone itself is pretty stable, but it just looks somewhat ugly since it's made up of thousands of small fragments. We've adopted a technique using tinted hydrocal to fill in these small surface gaps to help give the bones a little more strength as well as make them look less pixellated (to borrow a term from a friend).

Left jugal after initial prep

Left jugal beginning restoration

Left jugal after finishing

Pixellated right quadratojugal

Much better with plaster

And in further comparison to the size of Pete III vs. Tyrannosaurus rex, here's a teaser comparing the left ectopterygoids of our Daspletosaurus vs a mounted copy of a rex. Not a whole lot of difference there overall.

Can't wait to get finished with this head...

Daspletosaurus prep update: now with arms

Hip block. Yowza.

I know I've spent a lot of my previous blog posts focusing on the Platecarpus skull we were getting ready to send off witht he travelling circus to Tucson. Well, they're out the door and I can swing my attention back to our Daspletosaurus "Pete III".

Need some claws

Preparation  is about 98% finished, with a few straggler parts and the pelvis block to finish up. We've also begun the restoration of some of the bones, partly for increased stability and partly because they're much less ugly now.  Mark Wildman posted on his blog recently a tidbit mentioning Daspletosaurus had the longest forelimbs of any tyrannosaurid. I'm not sure if that's correct, however comparing our measurements with others published for Tyrannosauurs rex, we're a bit longer overall, even though we estimate Pete III to be nearly 10 feet shorter in overall length than "Sue".

The beginning of restoration of the arms

One of the nice things about preparing and restoring these bones (finally) is that we can uncover some new information about Pete III. Based on the size of its femur, we can estimate it was around 20 years old when it died, which is pretty old for Daspletosaurus. I've starting to use "it" when referring to Pete III because one of the next mysteries I hope to solve is whether it was male or female. Stay tuned for updates!

Daspletosaurus prep update

Jacob and I have been hammering away at the remaining small jackets of Pete III. By small I mean things less than the 4 ton main jacket monstrosity that we'll eventually have to confront. This week we've finished the left femur and ilium, along with a slew of gastral elements, vertebrae, and other bits and pieces.

Anterior dorsal of Pete III compared to Stan

The ilium has a strange mass of punky bone on the medial face of the pubic peduncle. We've seen a few instances of old age related pathology on this specimen, it wouldn't surprise me to find more.

Medial surface of left ilium, 42 inches long

Before long, we'll be started on the pathological tail section. Can't wait!

Caudal view of left femur.

Daspletosaurus prep restarts: this time with skull bones

While I was away soaking up pathogens at SVP in Las Vegas last week, paleotech Jacob Jett has been busy preparing some of the jackets from the weathered edge of Pete III's excavation. The bone was in difficult shape to begin with (earning the nickname "The pixelated Tyrannosaur" at SVP) before seeing several hundred Montana freeze-thaw cycles, making this prep work one of our greatest challenges to date. However, results are here! Skull bones so far include both quadrates, a jugal, both quadratojugals, a spenial, pterygoid and possible surangular, with more to come. No toothy bits yet though.

The left quadrate. Actually recognizable!

Dorsal vertebra #1, giving you an idea of the sheer size of Pete III. Transverse process span is 15 inches (38cm)

Surprise! Manual phalanx!

We still have many jackets (including the majority of the big 4-ton monstrosity) to prepare, however we're confident that the majority of the skeleton and perhaps 20-30% of the skull is here. Check back for more updates!

Disassembling a large jacket

As many of you know, we had to remove our big Daspletosaurus, Pete 3, in 75 different jackets. Jacket RMDRC 06-005-72 was done with a pallet method, weighing in at 4 tons. Paper here on the process.

This week we are making a concerted effort to take that enormous jacket apart, in hopes of keeping it stable as well as recovering a large section of real estate smack dab in the center of the lab. Unfortunately, some bones are going to have to be broken or cut to "unjackstraw" them, but will be reassembled later. The jackstrawed nature of the bones (as well as their fragility) is what made us remove the huge block in the first place, so it's not like it's a huge surprise. Still, it is a lot of work.

Daspletosaurus vs. T-rex

One of Pete 3's humerus compared to a cast of Peck's Rex. The other humerus is awiting removal from the main jacket.

Pete 3 now published!

For all of you out there keeping tabs on our Daspletosaurus prep projects (which seem to be hitting high gear again), you probably know how much I complain about the matrix and bone quality issues on them. For BCT, it's soft-ish bone locked in a hard sandstone with Ironstone concretion. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum it is Pete 3 with very soft sandy matrix encasing super fragile and shattered bones.

I did a poster presentation on the Pete 3 issue at the first Fossil Preparations and Collections Symposium that Matt Brown helped host in 2008. The paper is now available online with the entire collection of presentations from the meeting.

Congrats Matt on making the volume available, and I hope to see some blog readers at this years meeting in Chicago.

Pete 3 Update

Preparation is going strong on some of the larger jackets, which has the added benefit of freeing up space in the lab for other things! Here's the left ilium, with a total length of 1115mm. The bone is still very soft and fragmented. The only really well preserved parts tend to be the toes and legs. The object to the top of the jacket is a cervical vertebra, which we will separate from the ilium once this side is prepared and we can rejacket and roll the bones. Then it will be restoration (primarily crack filling) and molding time, which can be very challenging.

These larger jackets are chock full of surprises. Due to the softness of the matrix and bone we were not able to fully excavate or identify the individual elements in the blocks. Now in the lab we are finding that this dinosaur is much more complete than we originally believed.

Welcome to the paleo lab

Welcome to the RMDRC's paleo lab blog. We're a working preparation, molding, casting and mounting lab in Woodland Park, Colorado. This blog is intended to give you a glimpse at more of the projects we're working on both here and in the field than what we're able to show in the monthly newsletter. Constructive questions and comments and suggestions are welcome.

We specialize in late Cretaceous marine reptiles, fish and dinosaurs, however who knows what kind of project may pop up.

To start, here's an update on a long-running project of ours, Pete 3, RMDRC 06-005, a Daspletosaurus torosus specimen that we excavated in 2006 from the Judith River Formation in central Montana. It's in a very splintered condition, but we've developed techniques to allow us to prepare this material in order to mold it (paper in press). Currently there are 67 bones prepared, mostly ankle, pes and caudal elements. We still have an estimated 200 bones to work on. It is hard to tell for sure as we had to be very cautious in the field and expose as little as possible before jacketing. This gives us happy surprises of additional bones in the jacket.

We estimate Pete to be about 11m (36 feet) long, and it should take us a good year to prepare all of the material. Scapula-coracoid is 1100mm long, mt II (in photo) is 460mm. Prep is now concentrated on a medium-sized (we'll rate it as a 2-hernia) jacket with the left ilium and a cervical vertebra, as well as another similar sized jacket with articulated mid caudal vertebrae and chevrons.