Nov 20, 2007 8:23 pm US/Eastern
Fabricators Painstakingly Piece Together T-Rexs
PATERSON, N.J. (KDKA) ―
It is a workshop unlike any other.
Not one - but two T-Rexs command the studio floor at "Phil Fraley Productions" in Paterson, New Jersey.
In one corner, the "holotype" T-Rex -- the first specimen of its kind ever taken out of the ground at Hell Creek, Montana in 1902.
In another area, the "Peck's Rex", which was unearthed at Fort Peck, Montana.
"The Pecks Rex is the younger, newcomer," said Museum Exhibit Fabricator Phil Fraley.
Both behemoths belong to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and are at the New Jersey warehouse for a make-over.
When these T-Rexs face-off next spring in the museum's new Cretaceous Hall, they'll be battling over a big meal -- the carcass of an Edmontosarus in a fight to the death.
It's the kind of realism these exhibit fabricators are after.
"Scenes that we wanted to create to put these dinosaurs in, to capture essentially –one, one thousandth of a second -- just a moment in time," said Fraley.
Approximately 60 percent of the T-Rex is the original fossilized bone… not bad for a 70 million year-old fossil.
The few missing parts are replaced with modeled resin.
Over the past year-and-a-half project manager Larry Lee and a team of restorers have cleaned off all the old paint, varnish and adhesives.
Each T-Rex vertebra is strung like an "add-a-pearl-necklace."
Those working with the long gone creatures feel that the animal actually guides them.
"It's almost as if the bones or the fossils themselves are dictating to you how they want to be put back together," said Fraley.
The Carnegie's T-Rex is the grand daddy of them all.
"So that if anybody else ever finds another T-Rex they literally have to compare theirs to ours to ensure that it is indeed a T-Rex," said
Dr. Chris Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
But the Carnegie didn't always own the T-Rex.
It was bought from the American Museum in New York in 1942 for just $7 million.
Barnum Brown, who found the T-Rex was the best known dinosaur hunter of his time.
They called him "Mister Bones."
Between the late 1800s and 1922, Andrew Carnegie's bone collectors shipped 446-crates of dinosaur fossils weighing 700,000 pounds back to Pittsburgh from the Wild West.
The next challenge was figuring out how the gigantic skeletons fit together and how to display them.
This second generation of mount makers uncovered a few surprises left for them by those who first assembled these dinosaurs like a scrap of wood dated 1915 with the signatures of famous Carnegie preparers Moorhouse and Coggeshall.
With the opening of the Carnegie Museum's $36 million dinosaur exhibit, the wonder of preserving these prehistoric marvels will echo across the generations.
Young and old will have new reasons to dream.
The long-awaited exhibit, Dinosaurs in Their Time, will open on Wednesday, November 21st at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Learn more about the exhibit, the restoration effort and how you can get tickets by clicking on the links below:
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