RALEIGH, N.C. — Visitors to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh can now watch scientists dig into a fossil that may turn out to be a dinosaur no one has named yet. The 75-million-year-old skeleton was hauled into the museum’s SECU DinoLab on Wednesday.
Getting it inside was its own project. The bones are still locked in a block of sandstone wrapped in a protective plaster jacket that weighs about 5,000 pounds. The city closed West Jones Street downtown between Wilmington and Salisbury streets for the move, and crews raised the block with an excavator and passed it through a side window.
Museum paleontologists dug the specimen out of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, in the southern part of Utah, working with researchers from the Natural History Museum of Utah. The museum says it is the first largely complete skeleton of this kind of animal found in that region. The team first spotted a leg with each bone still in its natural position, then turned up the tail, the other hind leg and pieces of the neck.
Lindsay Zanno, who leads paleontology at the museum, has described the animal as built much like an ostrich: 8 to 10 feet long, fast on its feet, with a toothless beak and feathers. It dates to the late Cretaceous. Her team earlier worked on the museum’s well-known Dueling Dinosaurs fossil.
The work will not be quick. Museum staff expect preparation to take a couple of years, and the lab was designed so the public can see the science as it happens instead of waiting for a finished exhibit.
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