Bone or composite? Several of the dinosaurs on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center&#;s Dinosaur Hall contain a mix of fossils excavated by the museum&#;s paleontology team and casted bones built and mounted by Research Casting International. Source | CW
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&#;Dinosaur skeletons are never complete.&#; Glenn Storrs, Ph.D., associate VP for collections and research and Withrow Farny Curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum Center (Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.), adds that if you are able to dig up 50% or more of a dinosaur&#;s bones out in the field, you can build a pretty accurate restoration.
Composite materials &#; whose light weight, strength and other properties lend themselves to high-profile applications such as structural parts for commercial aircraft, wind turbine blades and pressure vessels for energy storage &#; can also be used, it turns out, to fill gaps in the fossil record. In some cases, replicas also enable museums to display their specimens to the public, while the original bones are kept behind-the-scenes for research and study.
&#;Back in the day &#; and when I say that, I mean as far back as the s &#; museums originally used plaster of paris,&#; Storrs says. &#;It was about 40 years ago that resins came into wider use.&#;
For smaller bones and casts for exhibits within the museum &#; plants or fish, for example &#; museum staff use urethane foams to cast and sculpt the replicas themselves, says Dave Might, exhibits coordinator/artist at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Almost complete. The skeleton for the Cincinnati Museum Center's Galeamopus was an almost complete skeleton, excavated by Glenn Storrs and his team. Research Casting International filled in the missing bones. Source | CW
Dinosaur bones and larger museum displays can pose a unique challenge, however. Although bones range in size, they can be massive, and any material replicating them must be light enough to be suspended in the air on a mounted display, and durable enough to last for many years. &#;Depending on the size of the skeleton, we may need a strong, rigid exterior surface and hollow inside,&#; Storrs says. He adds, &#;A big, heavy piece of plastic won&#;t work, and, frankly, wouldn&#;t cure properly anyway.&#; Composite materials, whether solid or foam-filled, are often able to fill these material needs.
Dave Might remembers the animals in the Ice Age exhibits, built decades ago for the Cincinnati museum &#; a mastodon, a giant bison and others, now on display at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport &#; that museum staff made casts for on-site using fiberglass composites. They even produced a large, fiber-reinforced lizard once, he recalls.
More recently, though, for the dinosaurs now on display in the museum&#;s Dinosaur Hall, the Cincinnati Museum Center, like many museums around the world, turned to a company called Research Casting International (RCI, Trenton, Ontario, Canada) for its fossil casts.
Molding and casting composite dinosaur bones
RCI operates a 50,000-square-foot facility in Ontario, Canada, alongside a 10,000-square-foot facility to store the company&#;s roughly 15,000-20,000 molds from about 270 different dinosaur skeletons. The company does everything from aiding the museums in fossil digs, to molding and casting bones, to mounting the exhibits within the museums.
Making the molds. Technicians from RCI painstakingly build silicone molds of Bracchiosaurus &#;&#;vertebrae. Source | RCI
Matt Fair, general manager of operations at RCI, has been in the business of molding and sculpting dinosaur bones for 30 years, starting at RCI three years after the facility opened in . Sometimes, Fair says, a museum just needs to fill in missing bones that were not retrieved in the field excavation, such as the case with the Cincinnati Museum Center&#;s Galeamopus skeleton, collected by Storrs and his team with almost 80% of fossils intact. RCI can use its vast collection of bone molds from other museum fossils to create a bone cast based on another skeleton of the same species.
Alternatively, some entire skeletons can be purchased &#;off-the-shelf&#; from RCI. &#;For example, take Tyrannosaurus rexes,&#; Fair says. &#;There are only about 29 or so skeletons in the world, and that&#;s not nearly enough for all of the museums and theme parks that want one. So we produce 100% composite T. rexes.&#;
Off-the-shelf T. rex. This T. rex on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a 100% fiberglass/polyester replica built by RCI. Source | RCI
According to Fair, a typical dinosaur casting project takes about three months to complete if RCI already has a mold in stock for that species, and longer if the project requires fabrication of a new mold.
First, when needed, the company helps in the collection of fossils in the field&#; in addition to the casting side of its business, RCI also helps with fossil preparation and specimen storage. Then, back at the Ontario facility, the casting department makes a mold directly from the bones. Applying digital laser scanners from Artec 3D (Luxembourg, U.K.) to scan the original bone, RCI is able to create an accurate reconstruction or, depending on the need, to enlarge or reduce the part for the exhibit, create mirror-image parts, or digitally sculpt missing parts. The molds themselves are made of room temperature-vulcanizing (or curing) RTV silicone rubber, and fiberglass for the mother mold. According to Fair, the company&#;s 3D Systems (Rock Hill, S.C., U.S.) 3D printers are also sometimes used to create molds, or to build larger or smaller replicas.
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Ready for casting. The finished mold for a Bracchiosaurus vertebrae replica is made of silicone (red) on top of a fiberglass mother mold. Source | RC
Depending on the size and weight requirements for the part, RCI uses mostly fiberglass mat or roving from suppliers including INEOS (Columbus, Ohio, U.S.), Polynt (Brampton, Ontario, Canada), or Composites Canada (Mississauga, Ontario, Canada), but they have also used carbon fiber for some of the largest parts that need to be the most lightweight, as well as Kevlar and other materials. Resins, often epoxy or others depending on the project, are supplied by companies including West System Inc. (Bay City, Mich., U.S.) and Smooth-On Inc. (Macungie, Pa., U.S.). The cast itself is then produced mainly via hand layup, which for some large parts, may also be vacuum-bagged; smaller parts may be made with chopped fiber dispensed via a spray gun is used. Next, the part is demolded, trimmed and set up on a metal armature alongside the rest of the skeleton. The composite designs, unlike the actual fossils, Fair says, often account for the metal frame running through the middle of the part, to hide the framing better. Finally, the part is finished with paint and gives the appearance of actual bone, and sometimes additional sculpted elements to give the appearance of skin.
Composites on display around the world
The first project Fair ever worked on was a fiberglass/polyester Allosaurus on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., U.S. Some of the largest projects RCI has done to date include nine all-composite replicas of &#;Sue,&#; the most complete T. rex skeleton discovered, which can be found in several museums as well as Disney World&#;s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., U.S.
RCI&#;s dinosaur casts can be found in museums globally, but the company&#;s work isn&#;t limited to museum dinosaurs, Fair says. Other projects topping his list include dinosaur replicas for the Jurassic Park movies, planetarium planets and fiberglass composite panels depicting geographical surfaces from around the world for the American Museum of Natural History. &#;It&#;s pretty neat to walk into a museum somewhere, or a theme park,&#; notes Fair, &#;and see your work on display.&#;
South Bend Chocolate Company founder Mark Tarner is now about a month away from his June 20 goal for opening his new Indiana Dinosaur Museum.
Since selling his first South Bend Chocolate Company products 23 years ago, Tarner has built the business into 17 stores in three states. Over that time Tarner also grew fascinated with paleontology, finding thousands of dinosaur fossils during annual digs in Montana.
Tarner has said COVID nearly wiped out the candy business and the museum, but forgivable federal loans, along with strong support from South Bend Mayor James Mueller and Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, saved the project.
On a sprawling site near the interchange of U.S. 31 and Lincolnway, west of the South Bend airport, Tarner has built more than just a museum. There will be six attractions: the museum, his candy production facility, a South Bend Public House bar and restaurant, a Continental Divide park, and a South Bend Farms market.
I asked Tarner whether there&#;s a theme that ties the six attractions together, or whether he thinks there needs to be one.
&#;It is an incredible question and it is the question,&#; Tarner said. &#;But when you go to a city, let&#;s say you go to New York, Broadway is very different from Central Park. Central Park is very different from Wall Street. The Hudson is very different from the East River. You want a diversity of things that you can pick from and I think it&#;s going to work just because it&#;s unique, and just like any other attraction, you&#;ll take from that what you can get.&#;
One of the first things you notice about the campus and its buildings is its massive size. There&#;s 100,000 square feet under roof on 90 acres.
&#;A lot of people don&#;t realize that it&#;s not just the dinosaur museum and the chocolate factory going in,&#; said Melissa Florian, one of the many employees scrambling to get everything ready. &#;We have South Bend Farms which is going to have a market attached to it. We have the South Bend Public House, and this one actually has a stage and outdoor seating that&#;s really, really cool.&#;
Florian says the South Bend Farms market will sell produce grown both on site and by area farmers. It also will house the relocated Studebagels.
Since the museum is incorporated as a nonprofit, Florian said they&#;re still looking for volunteers, for the museum and for handling animals.
Out back, they&#;ve recreated a miniature version of the nearby Lydick Bog, and their trail system eventually will connect to the bog, a low-lying swampy area.
Inside the musuem, Tarner showed me the stars of this show, the dinosaurs. There are two huge models of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and in the gift shop, there's a T-Rex head below large words on the wall that read, &#;BUY OR DIE.&#;
&#;What I wanted to do is bring dinosaurs alive and I think we&#;ve done that,&#; Tarner said. &#;There are, I think, 80 sculptures in here and it&#;s by two artists, Mike Trcic and Charlie McGrady, and Mike did all the work on Jurassic Park. He was a sculptor, a puppeteer and he sold it to me. It was sitting in a warehouse for 30 years and it had a little cut in it, a defect, and that&#;s on display. It&#;s really a neat piece.&#;
Tarner says he wants the museum to be serious and educational, but also fun. He hopes visitors will come away with a better understanding of nature and time, and the tiny role we play in it all.
&#;We&#;re part of a greater whole. It&#;s a story that keeps unfolding that we&#;re all a part of but we just can&#;t see it in millions of years, we see it in our lifetime, 80 years. Turtles live longer than we do and it&#;s kind of humbling.&#;
Tarner said there are about 30 dinosaur museums around the country and he&#;s visited most of them, taking a lot of notes.
&#;Museums are kind of an older institution and they have one foot in the Victorian era, and they&#;re kind of designed by academics. Ours is different. It&#;s designed for the age of the internet. It&#;s Instagrammable. You can take your picture. And there are a lot of comparisons to the past and the present, so it&#;s an exciting thing because it&#;s a museum that I built for me and I wasn&#;t the best student in science.&#;
Another noticeable feature throughout the museum is the large lettering on the walls. Tarner says retailing chocolate taught him the importance of labeling.
&#;When you&#;re in a grocery store with 2,000 other products, your label makes you stand out. And then once you buy the label you buy the quality. So we designed this like a package. It&#;s easy to read, it&#;s clear, and its quick and to the point, almost like ad copy. What&#;s the central message?&#;
He&#;s especially excited to display one of his own most valuable finds, the skull of a yet-to-be-identified sauropod, the long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs believed to be the largest land animals ever.
&#;We don&#;t know what it is. We took it to a convention and probably 100 paleontologists looked at it and they don&#;t know what it is. That's kind of great. It&#;s great for me, it&#;s great for the museum, and it&#;s also great for South Bend because you travel to urban areas all over the world to see the Mona Lisa, to see Sue the T Rex in Chicago, and this will give us a very special thing that will turn this museum from the best small dinosaur museum in the country to one of the best ones in the world.&#;
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