I love the concept of paleo-labs in museums where visitors can watch fossil preparators and paleontologists work on fossils brought in from the field (I've heard that the one at the Page Museum in L.A. is the best, although the one at the Academy of Natural Sciences isn't too shabby, either). If you live near Los Angeles and enjoy such exhibits, too, then you're in luck; the L.A. County Natural History Museum just opened the "Thomas the T. rex Lab" where you can see researchers working on the skeleton of a young Tyrannosaurus.
The preservation and restoration of "Thomas" is part of a larger renovation of the paleontology exhibits at the museum set to be unveiled in 2011, but I'm more excited about what the skeleton will reveal about Tyrannosaurus. According to statements made by Luis Chiappe in this article, the skeleton is from a sub-adult individual that shows some signs of having a tumor in the skull, and therefore being quite significant to understanding the growth, pathology, and paleobiology of the most famous of dinosaurs. When "Thomas" can be fully analyzed, I'm sure that someone will want to do a comparison with "Jane" at the Burpee Museum, although that could potentially re-open the controversy about the identity of "Jane" if the two skeletons don't match up closely enough.
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Regarding the public watching paleontologists work on specimens from the field, they actually can do that at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland. Its not a big facility, but there certainly is a window to an area where scientists are toiling on a Miocene cetacean skull, actinopterygii vertebrae, or a sample brought by a local.
You can also see them preparing fossils at the New Mexico Natural History Museum. I was actually in LA last year for a convention and I made a special trip to the museum, the dinosaur exhibit was closed but it wasn't on the website! I was really ticked.
And every time I got to see these 'CSI' exhibits no one is there.
Love the blog!
Best,
Brett
There are many museums where you can see prep in action: Museum of Western Colorado, Burpee, Museum of the Rockies (to a lesser extant), Denver, the Field Museum....
Its to bad another tyrannosaur is getting all the attention. The LACM has a BEAUTIFUL Triceratops with articulated postcrania that I would much rather see prepared. But I am bias.
You've heard correctly. Love that place.
Is there any indication of how large an animal this specimen represents?
I look forward to the inevitable comparison with Jane. Maybe we'll finally figure out whether Nanotyrannus is valid or not.
The "Thomas Lab" site has most of the information available. It says that it's 28 feet long and was about 12-16 years old at the time of death, but that's all that I was able to find as yet.