Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Carnegie Dinos Get Facelift

From Phillyburbs.com:

Starting Tuesday and for the next three years, visitors will be able to watch as five fossilized skeletons are taken apart and put back together as part of a $35 million renovation of the Pittsburgh museum's almost century-old Dinosaur Hall. The Dinosaur Hall now is home to 15 skeletons of dinosaurs, including some by which all other skeletons are judged - the Diplodocus (found in 1899 and now the museum's mascot, nicknamed "Dippy"), the Apatosaurus louisae (formerly known as the Brontosaurus and named for Carnegie's wife when it was found in 1909) and the Tyrannosaurus rex (the first one found in 1902 and bought from the American Museum of Natural History in 1941).

Those three dinosaurs as well as the Allosaurus and the Protoceratops will be reassembled in more dramatic and scientifically accurate poses. Over the next nine months, Phil Fraley and his team from Hoboken, N.J., will take apart the dinosaurs piece by piece and box them up in specially made crates filled with foam. They'll be trucked to New Jersey where they will be repaired and restored so they will last another 100 years.