Natural History Museum of Los Angeles opens New Dinosaur Hall

NEW Dinosaur Hall opens July 16th

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 

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The new hall features 300 specimens, some brand new to the museum's collection and some even new to science itself.  At the entrance a magnificent Triceratops mounted in front of the massive 70 foot long Mamenchisaurus.  On the left wall is a realistic mural by julius csotonyi, and on the right a "fossil wall" which houses approximately 100 fossil bones, coperlites, skin impressions, and foot prints from all sorts of Mesozoic creatures.   The exhibit is not organized in the traditional "family tree" or "walk through time" fair where relationships, classifications and time periods loom over the viewer constantly.  Instead, the museum uses its collection to convey how science is used in paleontology, and how the research is actually carried out.

  There are of course various interactive displays, touch screens, "touchable" specimens and other things that people come to expect from dinosaur exhibits.  There are some features however, that set this exhibit completely apart from all the rest. For instance, the viewer will notice the relative absence of glass in many of the large mounts.  This allows for an uncanny intimacy with the specimens, and great photos! The modern presentation is paired with up to date content.  The various displays undoubtably discuss diet, ecology, behavior, development and growth, and some of the major ideas surrounding dinosaur evolution, and extinction.

View from mezzanine over looking Carnotaurus, and T. rex tableau.

The worlds only Tyrannosaurus rex growth series.

Allosaurus and Stegosaurus

Pregnant Polycotylus, (a short necked plesiosaur).

Now Here is a show case of the projects that you may remember from previous posts.

Juvenile Edmontosarus, with skull reconstruction, and illustration by Doyle Trankina.

Close up, overhead view of juvenile Edmontosaurus.  

T. rex Tableau with hadrosaur carcass in foreground.

Baby T. rex, postcranial reconstruction by Doyle Trankina

Various Illustrations for interpretative graphics for the museum's mounted specimens, by Doyle Trankina

Struthimimus

Corythosaurus

Veloceraptor

baby Edmontosaurus.

Fruitadens haagarorum, created by Doyle Trankina 

Mamenchisaurus. Skull reconstruction by Doyle Trankina

Want more about the hall? Here are some links!

Dinosaur hall opening on the Natural History Museum Website

L.A. Weekly

KCRW / Which Way LA? / Warren Olney

NBC Nightly News

LA Daily News

LA Weekly

KCET

Agence France Presse (here picked up on Physorg.com)

Pasadena Star News

Billings Gazette (in Montana where Thomas the T. rex was found)

Out and about TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlfXMquvSZg&feature=youtu.be

Reconstructing Edmontosaurus

Sculpting, with an adult specimen in the background.

  Edmontosaurus was a hadrosaur, or commonly known as a “duck billed” ornithischian dinosaur from the late Cretaceus of N. America. Edmontosuarus would have coexisted with animals like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Thescelosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Ornithomimus, and Toodon, among others. Full grown this herbivore would have measured around 30 to 40 feet long, and weighed in the area of 4 to 6 tons.

Two dimensional life reconstruction by the artist

  Charged with reconstructing the skull of a juvenile approximately half the size of an adult, Doyle is using various reference materials such as science publications, photographs illustrations and a very complete adult Edmontosaurus skull, to inform his work.

  As with his previous projects, the reference must not simply be copied, but reinterpreted when applied to the proportions of a young dinosaur. Like the baby T. rex, Doyle will need to consider the proportional transitions of juvinile to adulthood that take place in animals, and specifically hadrosaurs. Fortunately, hadrosaurs are very well represented in the fossil record, and Edmontosaurus is one of the largest of this group. Some specimens of this genus were found preserved in the round with skin impressions, or soft tissue stains, for example the notable specimen AMNH 5060, also known as the "Trachodon mummy" found by Charles Hazelius Sternberg in 1908.

  The goal of this project is not to simply recreate the skull as it would have been seen idealistically, but in a way that is harmonious with the specimen. This is a bit of a challenge because correct anatomical structures must be laid down first and then the distortion must follow only after considering how the bones moved during fossilization. Its a little like making a model car that has crashed, rolled over and now badly rusted but the make and model remains recognizable. In essence the formal qualities must survive the distortion enough to place it as Edmontosaurus, but not so much so that it fails to blend with the specimen.

LACM 23504 in dorsal (top) view

  The specimen itself, LACM 23504, was collected in 1965 from the Hell Creek formation of Montana by Harely Garbani, an extremely talented field paleontologist and major contributor to the Museum's Mesozoic collection. Although this is a fine specimen and preserved in the round with much of the post cranial intact, the skull is quite mangled and what remains is weathered and crushed. The neck is curled back, putting the top of the skull perpendicular with the ground plane. Essentially this means that the jaw, and palate will be in clear view, and only one side of the skull will be really viewable, but when reconstructions are produced for museum exhibition they are also used as research and education materials. It is common that an animal, especially a rare one, is shared with other institutions in the form of cast reproductions for this purpose. Although nothing is planed as of yet, many of specimens that Doyle has worked on don't just go into exhibits, they are reproduced for other applications.

Cranial reconstruction. Gray material is a cast of the specimen.
The brown material is the clay reconstruction.

This specimen will be exhibited in the Tyrannosaurus tableau as a carcass, and potential meal of the fearsome three in the new Dinosaur galleries at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

 

Tyrannosaurus Growth Exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles

Sculpting a caudal vertebra.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles is approximately a year away from unveiling Dinosaur Mysteries, a modern exhibition with new content, discoveries, and nearly 300 Mesozoic specimens. The exhibit will include many new and some refurbished fossil mounts which a team of paleontological preparators at the NHMLA have diligently and skillfully cleaned, conserved, and restored for museum exhibition, and scientific study. This is a rare opportunity for anyone working in a museum to take part of especially if it means working on the King of all dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex.

One of the more notable specimens to be exhibited is Thomas, a sub adult Tyrannosaurus rex, which died 66 million years ago in Montana. The center piece of the exhibit is a tableau featuring three rexes of varied ages to illustrate how these animals grew, and possibly suggest a pack or family unit which might have cooperated in hunting prey, or securing carrion.  The three mounts will appear to be investigating an Edmontosaurus carcass, (a Hadrosaur or duck billed dinosaur), a likely food source during the Cretaceous.

Thomas is estimated to be an adolescent perhaps 13 to 16 years old when it died. On the other extreme, the baby is thought to be about 2 year old when it died, making it very fleet footed but quite vulnerable to predation. The intermediate of the two is a juvenile animal measuring about 20 feet long but would have less than half the mass of a full adult.

The difficulty of reconstructing a baby dinosaur lies directly with the sparseness of quality specimens in the fossil record. Although research suggests that there are several anatomical, and proportional differences between a baby and adult dinosaurs, there is no known complete baby Tyrannosaurus rex to base this reconstruction on, so this is only a speculation, but a very educated guess as to what the animal might have looked like.

The baby T. rex specimen known as LACM 2841, is very incomplete, and no post-cranial elements were ever found with the remains. This priceless fragment was originally collected by Harley Garbani in the 1960's, and is estimated to have been about 60 lbs and 10 feet long. In order to extrapolate information from the fossil record accurately the artist worked closely with the museum's Dinosaur Institute Director Luis Chiappe, a Vertebrate Paleontologist specializing in theropod and avian evolution.

LACM 2841  painted cast of the maxillary area of the skull.

Articulated left scapula and arm.

One significant trait that seems to be common in dinosaurs and many other animals living and extinct, is a gracile bone structure having softer processes, and trochanters with larger fenestra, particularly in regards to the orbits. For a young T. rex, the bones would be much lighter, and unfused as seen in sub adult animals today including humans. This is also evident in the specimen Thomas, especially in the skull which was completely disarticulated when it was being collected between 2004 to 2004. It was noted that on several vertebrae of Thomas that some of the centrums were dislocated from their corresponding neural spines at least partially if not altogether.


To reconstruct the baby T. rex Doyle used adult skeletal reference from several specimens and determined how much needed to change to suite the anatomy for a baby dinosaur. Using photo manipulation software and some digital painting, the artist was able to create an illustration for what he would use as a starting point when sculpting began. Doyle was charged with reconstructing all the post cranial elements, while Phil Fraley Productions would concentrate on completing the skull and metal armature that holds the whole specimen in position.

Doyle working on the right tibia, amongst his carvings.

The post cranial sculpt was executed in one pass (without molds in most cases) in dense carving foam, sealed in polyurethane resin and detailed with pnuematic tools and epoxy for finalizing a texture, and structural reinforcement. The process took about 4 or 5 months, which included a research and development period, a pre-production phase in which the 2 dimensional rendering was produced for reference and printed to scale, and lastly when the bones were sculpted one by one and then shipped to Phil Fraley Production for armature building. 

The baby T. rex in its cautious approach towards the Hadrosaur carcass to 
be displayed center to all three mounts.

While Phil Fraley Productions continued their work on mounting and painting the baby rex, Doyle moved on to his next project: a sculpted reconstruction of a Juvenile Edmontosaurus skull, based on another specimen collected by Harley Garbani.  This sculpt will be attached to the very complete skeleton which was beautifully preserved in the round and well articulated.

 

The Tyrannosaur trio, in the soon to be Dinosaur Hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.  The largest mount is Thomas, the smallest the reconstructed baby, and the medium sized rex to the left is a juvenile previously classified as Albertosaurus, and Nanotyrannus, but now believed to be a 6-7 year old Tryannosaurus rex.

Gramatica Parda: Art Exhibition at ANDLab Gallery, The Brewery Art Colony

 Gramatica Parda

ANDLAB

Gramatica Parda Art Exhibition at ANDLAB Gallery of the Brewery Art Colony in Los Angeles .

Featured artists:

Joe Merrell, lead artist

Paul McLean

Stephanie Abramowicz

Shane Kennedy

Doyle Trankina

Opening Reception

Saturday, September 25

6 - 9PM / Artist Talk 4 - 5PM

ANDLAB

600 Moulton Avenue, #303

Los Angeles, CA 90031

Doyle is one of five exhibiting artists for the exhibit Gramatica Parda, which features video, painting, drawing and sculpture at the gallery and studio space ANDLAB. The artists have utilized their experiences and knowledge in natural history, science and language to produce unique and compelling artwork which will be on exhibit for approximately 8 weeks. Doyle has produced three sculptures for this exhibit, one of which is a baby chimpanzee (shown above) titled Security Blanket. Gramatica Parda, literally translates from Spanish as “native wit”, a premise which lends itself well to an artist who works with conservation, paleontology, and natuaralism.

Museum Sculptor Doyle Trankina to Recreate Sub-Adult & Baby T Rex

As part of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles Doyle Trankina has attended several field excavations in Montana Utah, and Mojave.  While in the field Doyle prospected, and assisted in the collection of several specimens, most notably Thomas the sub adult Tyrannosaurus Rex that will be gracing the museums new Dinosaur Gallery in 2011.  Through his experiences with the museum with his private obsession with prehistoric life and the natural world,  Doyle has produced several sculptures and illustrations for exhibition and publication.  Doyle has an extensive list of sculptures to produce over the next two years. His work will require lots of observational study from the museum's collection, and extensive extrapolation based on the latest research, and modern analogues like birds, and crocodiles.

After completing the preparation of Thomas, Doyle embarked on a half skeletal, half flesh reconstruction of a sub adult Tyrannosaurus Rex.  At 1;24 scale the detail work was completed in part with magnification, .  The teeth were surfaced to provide the accurate thickness and semblance to where the tinny serrations would have lined the many teeth.  Because the position of the serrations actually change on the teeth as they move back towards the throat, the ridge implies the appropriate location of the serrations.  The scales were carved individually so that the skin wraps around the form in a realistic, and accurate way.  The detail and fidelity to the skeleton was accomplished by long study of the anatomy from several existing mounts, scientific publications, and photographs from the some of the best Tyrannosaurus specimens.  

Doyle is currently working on a skeletal reconstruction of a baby Tyrannosaurus rex which will be mounted in the new Dinosaur Galleries with Thomas and an intermediate specimen as an illustration of age progression.  The actual specimen is only known from a skull fragment from the snout of what is believed to be from a 2 year old Tyrannosaurus rex.  There are no post cranial remains, and there are   only a handful of examples that are believed to be that of baby dinosaurs. This project has just begun, and with Dr. Chiappe Doyle will be making history in presenting the worlds only mounted baby Tyrannosaurus rex specimen.  

Museum Sculptor Doyle Trankina Recreates Rare Mamenchisaurus Skull

Doyle is also working on Mamenchisaurus, a long neck dinosaur and part of the branch of Sauriscian (lizard hipped dinosaurs) known as Sauropods, in addition to his many other projects at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.  The rare skull was found in China and researchers provided a paper with a detailed description and several scientific illustrations.  Sauropod skulls are rare because they are so frail in construction, have several small bones that usually disarticulated some time after the animal dies, and are not commonly preserved in fossilization, or are so disarticulated and in such small pieces that they are nearly impossible to find.  As the prospects of obtaining a casting of the Chinese mamenchisaur skull proved too difficult, Doyle was charged with the task of reconstructing the skull from two dimensional reference and other dinosaurs like Camarasaurus for comparison, and to gain familiarirty with Sauropod skull anatomy.

Museum Sculptor Doyle Trankina to Market Fruitadens Scale Model of Smallest Dinosaur

Fall of 2009 marked one of the biggest Paleontology news splashes, featuring N. America's smallest dinosaur, Fruitadens haagarorum.   It is thought that the animal might have weighed as little as two pounds and measured only 28 inches in length.  Fruitadens was discovered in Colorado in the late 1970s in a geological formation known as the Morrison, more specifically in an area called Fruita, for which the specimen was named after.  Nearly 150 million year old, the tiny Fruitadens would have shared its life with such titanic beasts as Brachiosaursus, and Allosaurus in the late Jurassic.  

Fruitadens belongs to a family of early dinosaurs called heterodontosaurids, which share many interesting features, one of which are the teeth.  Fruitadens like other heterodontisaurids have varied dentition, and in the front of the mouth sits a canine like tooth on the lower jaw.  The strange dentition of this animal implies that Fruitadens might have been omnivorous, eating plants and at least insects if not small vertebrates.

Doyle has produced the first and most accurate illustrated and sculpted reconstructions of this animal.  His work was featured on every major news source in the world, and five of the sculpted Fruitaden will be featured in the new galleries in 2011.  In his studio, Doyle is currently working on a ½ scale Fruitaden, which will be approximately 30cm long .  This will be the only scaled sculpture of the animal, and the first and only for sale.  The full scale version is not for sale and can only be seen at the Museum.