Age of Dinosaurs #2

Date of Adventure 13 November 2024

Following up on the last post. At the Age of Dinosaurs Museum and tour we had 3 separate tours and the last post was just the first tour. The second and third one weren’t as photogenic but the tour of their restoration lab was the most interesting. I suppose most of us have some notion of the work that goes into digging up and restoring dinosaur bones or other fossils. This was a tour where we actually walked through the lab while a couple of people were doing the work. And, since it was a small group of tourists and a couple of us were very involved, their main restoration woman took time to talk to a few of us in detail about how things were done and to answer our questions. The tour guide was really good and it would have been a great tour even without the extra discussion.

They couldn’t take us to an actual dig but they have a demo of how it works with some of the tools used in the field.

When they get a bone exposed in the field they go to great lengths to stabilize it and wrap it, along with a lot of the surrounding matrix in a combination of cloth, newspaper, and plaster of Paris. They make a solution of some polymer (plastic to you non-scientists) in acetone and soak the bone with that in the field. After some time, the acetone evaporates, leaving the polymer in the bone to hold it all together.

These are real bones from three of the dinosaurs that they are working on. In all of the tours we were advised to stay a little back from the samples and not to touch. But we were allowed to touch these 3 bones. Honestly, they didn’t feel too special but it is something that you might not find in other tours.

There were several display cases containing different fossils, including some plant fossils. These two were interesting because of the information that they obtained from the few bones. The first is a pterosaur and they think it was fish eating from the nature of the teeth. But the second, Chookie, was different because they found fossilized food in the stomach. This data hasn’t yet been completely analyzed. (In Australia the word chook means chicken.)

Then we went into the working part of the lab. This is the actual sacrum from one of their specimens next to a cow sacrum. It really gave me a perspective on things!!

Then we just walked down through the working part of the lab. The woman at the back of the second picture is their main restoration person and she spent a lot of time talking to a few of us and explaining a lot of the details.

They were really good about showing how it’s all done. While we were walking through there was only one other person working. A woman was cleaning the rock away from a small bone with an air tool. Her work was broadcast on a video screen right there in the lab. So, here’s what she was doing.

Through the lab building there were all of these wrapped up bones waiting to be opened and cleaned. If you look closely at the picture you can see that this is a container with rib bones from 2015. They are pretty backlogged. I don’t know how many of these packages we saw but it was probably close to 50 in the whole facility.

Just a great tour if you want to know how it’s all done. And, it turns out you can volunteer to be a bone cleaner. I was told that it takes 10 days of training and it will cost you. They put you up in their local facilities and the price you pay to get trained is counted as a donation to the museum.

On to the last part of the tour.

This is a discussion and movie demonstration in their indoor theater. It was good, because it is air conditioned. I suspect that the temperature by the time we got to this point at close to noon was approaching 37 or 38.

They have a couple of really well done videos to explain the flora and fauna of the times of the dinosaurs. And a guide who explains some of the details, including a bunch of bones from some of their more famous dinosaurs. This is a really nice end to the tour. It was probably 45 minutes of video and discussion. Hard to say much about it but here are the bones that were laid out in the “theater” for us to look at. Don’t forget, these are the real bones, after stabilization and cleanup. Not like the replicas that you’ll see in most museums.

Next post will be a little shorter but it’s about my visit to the Dinosaur Stampede.