The Smithsonian Had To Dig Up Their Dinosaurs Again
As their famous fossil hall enters its final year of renovation, the museum is having to re-excavate some of its decades-old specimens.
In 1913, Barnum Brown, the man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex, unearthed a similar but smaller dinosaur near the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada. Now known as Gorgosaurus, the dinosaur was half-encased in plaster, and positioned in the classic “death pose” with its head arching backward over its spine. It stayed that way for decades on the wall of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s classic Dinosaur Hall. But now that the hall is entering the final year of its momentous, five-year renovation, the Smithsonian’s staff have to dig Gorgosaurus out all over again.
It currently sits in a cavernous basement room beneath the hall. The petrified bones protrude from a layer of plaster that’s been painted and textured to look like rock.
